TOM
Theory of Mind
Class: I - Natural Selection
EPA Total Score: 36 /100
Leekam, S., & Perner, J. (1991). Does the autistic child have a “metarepresentational” deficit? Cognition, 40, 203-218
Abstract: This study examines the claim that autistic children lack a “theory of mind” because of an inability to metarepresent. We argue that if autistic children have a “metarepresentational” deficit in Leslie's (1987, 1988) sense of the term, then they should have difficulty not only with mental representations such as false beliefs, but also with external representations such as photographs. Autistic children's understanding of photographic representations was tested using Zaitchik's (1990) task. This task is modelled on the false belief task (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985: Wimmer & Perner, 1983) but involves “false” photographs where a photographic representation does not conform with the current state of the real world. Like Zaitchik (1990) we found that normal 3 and 4-year-olds found this task as difficult as the false belief task. In sharp contrast, however, the autistic children in our study passed the photograph task but failed the false belief task. As both tasks require the ability to decouple, this evidence challenges the view that autistic children lack “metarepresentational” ability in Leslie's sense. However, the results leave open the question of whether autistic children have a metarepresentational ability in the different sense of the term intended by Pylyshyn (1978), that is, representing the relationship between a representation and what it represents.
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Supporting Evidence
20/100
Submitted by niruban
25/100
Submitted by niruban
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Supporting Evidence is evidence that suggests that this trait is an Evolved Psychological Adaptation (EPA) - i.e., that it has been shaped by natural selection to solve a particular adaptive problem.
Challenging Evidence
0/100
Submitted by niruban
0/100
Submitted by niruban
No one has (yet) rated this source as containing any challenging Medical evidence for this EPA.
No one has (yet) rated this source as containing any challenging Physiological evidence for this EPA.
No one has (yet) rated this source as containing any challenging Cross-Cultural evidence for this EPA.
No one has (yet) rated this source as containing any challenging Genetic evidence for this EPA.
No one has (yet) rated this source as containing any challenging Phylogenetic evidence for this EPA.
No one has (yet) rated this source as containing any challenging Hunter-Gatherer evidence for this EPA.
Challenging Evidence is evidence that suggests that this trait is not an EPA - e.g., that it is a product of cultural learning or genetic drift, or maybe it does not exist at all. However over each line of evidence for a description.