People with autism are known to lack the ability to automatically attribute mental states to self and others also known as “mindblindness”. A result of this impairment is failure on verbally instructed false-belief tasks. However, people with Asperger syndrome, a milder form of autism, seem to pass with flying colors. This presents a problem for the “mindblindness” theory. So do people with Asperger syndrome really have a theory of mind (ToM) contrary to popular theory?
Senju, Southgate, White, and Frith decided to take it upon themselves to sort out this confusion. Instead of using verbal instructions, they had adults with Asperger syndrome perform an eye-tracking task that measured the spontaneous ability to mentalize. This entailed subjects to view a scene of an actor first placing a ball into one of two boxes, then having a puppet move the ball to the alternative box unbeknownst to the distracted actor, thus causing a false belief in the actor about the location of the ball. Results showed that the Asperger group showed significantly less looking bias toward the correct window compared to a control group indicating the Asperger group’s inability to spontaneously anticipate others’ actions in a nonverbal task. It seems that to a certain extent they do lack a ToM. But then how are they able to pass the verbally instructed false-belief task? The authors suggest that because they are higher functioning compensatory learning is involved.
Senju A, Southgate V, White S, & Frith U (2009). Mindblind Eyes: An Absence of Spontaneous Theory of Mind in Asperger Syndrome. Science (New York, N.Y.) PMID: 19608858
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