Experimental Study On Theory Of Mind In Children With Autism: Mindreading In Self And Others Under Different Tom Contents

Recent years have witnessed a remarkably sharp rise in the prevalence of autism, making autism become a wide public concern. Children with autism typically show the disability in social interaction. Theory of mind (ToM) gives a fair good explanation to this disability and recently it is a hotspot in the field of autism research. Previous studies on ToM of children with autism generally focused on mindreading in others (understanding others’mind states) rather than mindreading in self (understanding one’s own mind states). However, the studies in self-mindreading play a great role in exploring self in children with autism as well as the developmental mechanism of ToM. What’s more, almost all the existing research focusing on self-mindreading comes from foreign countries. And it is often the case that only single content of ToM is studied in one research, which raises a demand of studies on the comparison and analysis of the performance on multiple ToM contents. Therefore, this research uses three experiments to study mindreading in self as well as mindreading in others of children with autism on multiple ToM contents:mindreading in self and others under the understanding of belief, knowledge and intention.Participants included 30 children with autism and 30 children with intellectual disability from different special education schools in Shanghai and 30 typically developed children from an ordinary kindergarten in Shanghai.The results showed that:(1) children with autism displayed a great damage in self-mindreading in understanding belief, knowledge and intention; children with autism displayed a great damage in mindreading in others in understanding belief and intention; (2) there was no significant difference between the performance of children with autism and children with intellectual disability on three experimental tasks, while there was a remarkably significant difference between the performance of children with autism and typically developed children; (3) there was a parallel performance between mindreading in self and mindreading in others, indicating that the hypothesis of the theory theory was probably right; (4) the development sequence of ToM in children with autism was basically the same as typically developed children, that is, children with autism developed the understanding of intention first and then the understanding of knowledge and belief; (5) there was no significant relation either between the performance of children with autism on the three experiments and their age or between the performance and the language ability of children with autism.