Summary Prepared by Jacy Ippolito, Tony Mendez, and Jonathan Welch (additions and comments by Frawley)
Theory of mind is the interconnected beliefs about other people's mind states (in other words, a person's ability to attribute a mental state to another person).
When talking about children and their theory of mind, it seems to be that young children (under the age of 3 or 4) fail to exhibit the signs of a fully developed theory of mind. We as adults can and do attribute mental states to others on a regular basis (i.e. Dad thinks Im at the movies when I'm really at my girlfriend's house; she was looking at the movie when I broke the lamp so she doesn't know that its broken; etc.) So if we as adults seem to have the ability to attribute mental states to others, and we can "jump over" the content or reality of a situation and understand that another person might hold a different attitude, then why is it that young children cannot? Do they "acquire" this ability, and if so, is there is specific stage in development when the "theory of mind" module becomes active? Is there a "module" for theory of mind? (It is important to note that as of yet there has not been discovered a distinct piece of tissue or a distinct area of the brain that seems to be dedicated to theory of mind abilities.)
These are the various questions that researchers have asked when studying the development of a theory of mind in young children. A test is also needed to determine whether a child has a developed theory of mind or not, and this leads us to the following steps of reasoning and testing for a theory of mind: Propositional Attitudes: attitudes towards the world. Typified by words such as "hope," "desire," "want," "guess," "believe," etc. Propositional Content: a statement about the world that could be tested by observing the world: "The pencil is on the table." This statement could be defined as either true or false after looking at the table and determining whether or not there is indeed a pencil on it. It is important to mention these terms because propositional attitudes can be expressed about propositional contents, and the only way to test propositional attitudes is by observing the mental attitude of the person making the statements. Following this line of thought, it does not matter if the statement "I think that the pencil is on the table" is true or false because the truth or falsity of the statement is based solely on the mental state of the subject. If the subject truly does believe that a pencil is on the table, then his statement is true regardless of whether or not there is actually a pencil on the table.
More technically: propositional content is within the scope of the propositional attitude. Attitude expressions are well known for the way they make content opaque. Note that "Bill Clinton" and "the President" are coreferential, but when put in the scope of a proposiitional attitude -- "I guess that Bill Clinton is the President" -- the coreference is no longer transparent.In order to test whether children can distinguish that individual people may have different and conflicting mental states despite the "content" of a situation, the False Belief Task was created. This is, as Dr. Landau put it, essentially a "litmus test to see if kids can discern the differences between reality and the mental states of people."
The False Belief Test Initial situation: An examiner, a child, and a third person (the confederate) are in a room.
Step 1: A child is shown a state of affairs (i.e. the examiner shows the child that there are 2 boxes on a table. Box A is full of pencils and Box B is empty.)
Step 2: The confederatethird personleaves the room, and the state of affairs is changed while the child is watching. (i.e. the examiner takes all of the pencils from Box A and places them if Box B. He closes the lids on both boxes, so that only he and the child know that the pencils are now in Box B.
Step 3: The third person reenters the room, and the child is asked what the confederate believes to be true about the situation. (i.e. the examiner will ask the child to state where he thinks that the confederate will search for the pencils, or where the confederate believes the pencils to be.)
A child of three years old will most likely fail this test and say that the confederate would search in Box B. The child, in this case, attributes a true belief (what the child knows to be true -- that the pencils are in Box B) to a person who actually holds a false belief (that the pencils are still in Box A).
Step 4: Controls: the child is asked to tell the examiner what the current state of affairs was before the person left the room and then now. The child is able to state that the pencils were once in Box A and are now in Box B. The child can sum up the situation, yet he cannot seem to attribute a belief other than his own to another person based on the idea that the other person did not experience the same things as the child and would therefore hold a different attitude.
A possible way to test whether a child has a theory of mind or not without compromising the child's performance level through complicated language is by employing the False Pretend Task. This task is basically the same situation as the false belief task; however, the examiner has an object which he is pretending is something (say a car). When the confederate leaves the room, the examiner asks the child to pretend that the object is something different from what is was before ("let's now pretend that its a bunny.") When the confederate reenters the room, the child seems to be able to say that the confederate would still think that they were pretending that the object is a car. The child seems to be able to accurately attribute a mental state in this situation because the entire task is based in the world of "pretend." The child seems to have an easier time when not having to "jump over" the physical evidence or reality of the situation. This might suggest that children have access to representational states very early in development, but their ability to put aside the reality of a situation comes later.
We then discussed how "theory of mind" is a higher order structure. This led into a discussion of disorders of the mind which disrupt such higher order structures and as Dr. Frawley puts it, "cuts the mind/brain at its joints." We discussed five major design disorders of the mind/brain that have at least partially congenital (or genetic) sources.
Williams Syndrome: this disorders source is a disruption in the genetic code (deleted code for elastin which affects the elasticity of the blood vessels). Its characteristics in sufferers are heart problems, flat faces, flat chests, and shortness. These children are mainly characterized by their extremely good linguistic abilities and amazing lexicons. They seem to be out of control when it comes to certain aspects of language though, for they will talk almost non-stop. They seem to be incredibly social, depending of course upon the individual. As a whole, however, they seem particularly bad with object recognition. When copying a picture they will draw only distinct pieces of the picture -- an exploded view. They are surprisingly good, even better than normal children, at face recognition, though. This shows that there is some separation of the face and object modules and that language cannot be reduced to spatial relationships. Another interesting aspect of Williams kids is that they don't point to objects as young children in order to derive meaning. Perhaps this is an aspect of their "broken" object recognition modules. Williams kids, although brilliant witht he semantics of language, are not great with pragmatics: they have difficulty with certain speech acts, sarcasm or metaphorical language. This would also suggest that the semantic and pragmatic parts of the brain can be disjointed. As with most of the congenital, design disorders, Williams kids have very little social and world knowledge, yet amazingly they have a pretty good theory of mind. Williams kids IQs are low to normal.
Turner Syndrome: this disorder affects the X-chromosome and results in only female sufferers. This disorder is similar to Williams syndrome in that the sufferer lacks object recognition abilities and yet is excellent in language abilities (lexicon, semantics). They also have rather good face recognition abilities and yet lack complex of the of social and world knowledge. Turner sufferers do appear to have a pretty good theory of mind just as Williams kids do. Turner syndrome sufferers have an IQ that is low to normal.
Spina Bifida with Hydrocephalus (SBH): this disorder is caused by the neural tube sticking through the spine and causing a collection of fluids in the brain or in the centralized location of the rupture. SBH sufferers follow patterns similar to Williams and Turner kids; however, their object recognition is much better than the other groups whereas their face recognition abilities are not as developed. Unlike Williams and Turner kids, SBH sufferers do not seem to have a clear theory of mind, nor social or world knowledge.
Autism: one out of every thousand births result in an autistic child. We are as of yet uncertain of the cause of autism, but we think it is a congenital disorder. It might be caused by a problem in the cerebellum, though it is also associated with rubella, calcification in the brain, or any number of other various metabolic disorders. Autistic children are withdrawn and lack some of the semantic and pragmatic abilities of language. They do, however, seem to have a fairly established sense of object and face recognition. Like SBH sufferers, they do not have developed theory of mind or a sense of social and world knowledge.
Down: caused by trisomy 21 (additional chromosome). Down syndrome sufferers have a distinctly low IQ, and have a fairly good phonology and syntax, but their semantic and their pragmatic abilities are poor (possibly because of a lack of communication: it is worthy to note, however, that language can develop without perfect world knowledge.) They also do not have a developed theory of mind.
*Another interesting note is that we are uncertain about how these disorders affect musical, mathematical, physical, or artistic activities, the other domains thought of as core.