A Study On The Sequence Of Steps In Theory Of Mind Development Of Children With Autism

Theory of mind (ToM) is the ability to attribute mental states, like beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives, to oneself and others, and to understand that mental states will govern the behavior of self and others. Achieving a theory of mind includes understanding multiple concepts potentially acquired in developmental sequences. Foreign researchers applied the ToM Scale to explore the development sequence, but domestic studies about autistic children’s ToM always use the false belief tests as a ’litmus’, and showing the tasks by only verbal language, which may underestimate these children’s genuine understanding. Hence we suppose that using a series of tasks with different difficulty levels, changing the research materials and the settings will promote the Autistic children’s understanding of ToM.To demonstrate this, we developed series of tests based on the Wellman’s 5-step theory-of-mind scale. All the tasks were preseated in 3 different versions:merely story-telling, assisted with cartoon pictures, and in social games involving competition to win a reward as the motive for tracking other players’ beliefs (recomposed according to the’Dot-Midge task’). Participants are all from special educational schools in Shanghai, China.Results indicate that (1) Children with autism showed a almost similar sequence of understandings (only different in the later two steps ofthe progression) with mental retarded children, the developmental orders are diverse desires, diverse beliefs, knowledge access, hidden emotiona and false beliefs in sequence; (2) Children with autism scored higher in competitive games and picture assisted tasks than conventional story understanding tasks. The performance of Children with autism in all 3 settings of ToM tasks were similarly lower than that of children with mental retardation, only in competitive games, there was no significant difference in two groups; (3) Verbal ability factor had significant effect on the ToM ability when the only child factor had no significant influence on the ToM ability in competitive games, but performance were not affected when the age effect was controlled.From the results, we can conclude that children with autism show an almost similar sequence in progressive mastery of interconnected facets of ToM with children with mental retardation. Standard false belief tests underestimate their genuine understanding of ToM. Competitive peer games and serial pictures may promote autistic children’s understanding of other’s mental states.