An Experimental Study Of Evaluating TOM Ability Of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Theory of mind(ToM) is the understanding of mental status of themselves and the others, using the ability of theory of mind, one can infer behavior of others in some special conditions.A lot of studies on children's ToM indicate that the development of ToM ability plays an essential role in children's development of perception, attention, cognition and emotion, as well as the development of contact ability with others. Actually, only has the ability of t To M, children can learn to master social skills. Children with autism spectrum disorders are usually have social interaction disorders, they cannot understanding other people's expression of eyes and body language, as well as other social interaction signals. Many studies indicate that the lack of ToM ability might be one of the main reasons which leading to those children's lack of social interaction ability and emotional disorder. By using different task presentation, this study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of new ToM evaluation tools; according to different ToM stories, investigating the effect of different evaluate content on the evaluate of ToM ability; at last, comparing the difference between children with autism spectrum disorders and normal children, exploring the characteristics of ToM ability of children with autism spectrum disordersTo exploring the developmental status and characters of ToM on children with autism spectrum disorders, this study use new evaluation tool to evaluate autism spectrum disorder children's and normal children's ToM ability. The experiment selected60subjects, which including30children with autism spectrum disorders and30normal children. Gong's Non-verbal Intelligence Test is also used in this study to ensure experimental group and control group not have significant difference in intelligence.8ToM stories were used in this study,4cognitive ToM stories and4emotional ToM stories respectively, and two different present ways—story telling (by recorder) and picture showing (by PPT) were used in this study as well,.All these stories come from The Animated Theory of Mind Inventory for Children Scale.The results indicate that:(1)There are significant difference between children with autism spectrum disorders and normal children in the ability of theory of mind, and the normal children have a higher score in total theory of mind tasks compared with children with autism spectrum disorders.(2)When ToM stories presented in different ways, the score from picture showing is higher than score from story telling;(3)The score of children with autism spectrum disorders on emotional ToM stories is lower than normal children, but there is no significant difference on cognitive ToM stories between them.