我手头有一本书，
<<解读别人的想法>>《understanding other minds》2ndED by Simon Baron-Cohen
第一篇："Theory of Mind and Autism: a fifteen-year Review."
我想翻译出来，不过我的英语很烂，可能要很久。作者: 雁冲天 时间: 2006-5-13 19:37 标题: re:[QUOTE][b]下面引用由[u]5i...
The first set of seven training sessions focused on teaching interactional and conversation skills such as how to begin and maintain topics of conversation, how to choose topics of interest to others, how to interpret and express non-verbal signals, and how to listen and express interest in others. The second set of sessions focused specifically on teaching theory of mind skills. The main focus of the training was role playing exercises with the emphasis on providing underlying problem-principles that might be applied to different situations. These sessions began with a role playing exercise in which children led a blindfolded trainer around an obstacle course. This was designed to teach the children how to take another person's visual perspective. Next the children were taught that what someone sees or hears indicates what they will know(i.e. the principle that 'perception influences knowledge'). Finally the children took part in a series of role-plays which mirrored the format of second-order false-belief tasks, although the specific content was different from the transfer tasks(e.g. Using different locations). For example, in one role-play children A,B,and C decide to go bowling together. After child A leaves to get changed at home, B and C revise the plan and decide to go to a film instead. B and C then go home separately. On the way home, B stops at A's house to tell him of the new plan. They agree to meet at the cinema and A leaves to go there. After changing, C stops at A's house and find he is not there. The groups members were asked to predict where C would think A had gone. After each of these scenarios the group discussed the underlying principle behind the role-plays. For example, for second-order false-belief role-plays, the principle was that 'since child C had not seen child B speak with A, he could not know that A knew of a revised plan.
Prior to training, the group scored an average of 6 out of a possible composite score of 13, although it it not clear from the results exactly which tasks the children were failing and which they were passing. When the children who had taken part in the training control group. However, the training appeared to have no effect on everyday social skills may have been because the SSRS did not provide a sensitive measure of the sort of skills one might expect to improve as a result of training. For example, the SSRS includes items such as 'is self confident in social situations' and 'is liked by other'. Alternatively, the improvement on the theory of mind task may have been the result of learning a specific non-mental rule which was applicable to some of theory of mind task in the battery, rather than learning to use mental-state terms. This is certainly possible given that the second-order role-plays involved the same scenarios as the second-order transfer tasks. This at least suggests that limited generalisation to different materials and characters can take place, even with a non mental-state rule. It is also possible that some children learned to infer mental states and to generalise this knowledge. A non mental-state rule learned for the second-order role-play scenario could not be used to pass the third-order double bluff task, and at least one child achieved this, since he achieved a maximum score after training. Unfortunately, since only composite score were presented we cannot be sure if any of the other children improved on task other than the second-order false-belief tasks. However, with this small sample of relatively high-functioning adolescents with autism the result were promising.
A group of less able children with autism(CA between none and ten years, VMA between five and six years) took part in training study conducted by Hadwin et al.(1996,1997). In this study the intention was to asses whether it would be possible to teach children with autism in one of three domains; (i)understanding of emotion;(ii)understanding of belief; or (iii)production of pretend play.
Thirty children with autism took part in the study. Prior to the training all the children were tested on tasks from each of the three domain. In each domain there were five tasks which were ordered into 'developmental levels', so that a level 1 task was the simplest and level 5 the most difficult. In the emotion domain the tasks were:(i)photographic face recognition; (ii)schematic face recognition;(iii)situation-based emotion understanding; (iv)desir-based emotion understanding; and (v)belief-based emotion understanding. In the belief domain the task were;(i)simple perspective taking; (ii)complex perspective taking;(iii)seeing leads to knowing; (iv)true belief understanding; and (v)false belief understanding. Finally, the five levels of play behaviour were:(i)sesorimotor paly; (ii)functional play(two or fewer examples); (iii)functional play (more than two examples);(iv)pretend play(two or fewer examples);(v)pretend play(more than two examples). For the pre-training assessment each child was presented with tasks in order from level 1 onwards until two consecutive levels were failed. The pre-training assessment therefore established a developmental level's score for each child in each domain.
Two additional assessments of conversation skills and use of mental-state words were also made before and after training. Children were asked to tell a story from a picture book and the frequencies of:(i)one-word answers; (ii)two or more sentences; (iii)echolalia; and (iv)unclear statements, were recored. Parents were instructed to ask questions and give prompts during the story telling in order to create a conversation-like interaction. The hypothesis was that improved theory of mind might help the child to understand that people know different things and that states of knowledge can be shared, so that theory of mind training would result in children expanding upon their 'conversation'. The frequency of mental-state words produced during this assessment was also recorded.
For the training itself, the children were divided into three groups, and each group was taught in a particular domain--emotion, belief, or pretence. The pre-training assessment indicated at which level teaching should begin for each child. For the emotion and belief groups each child was taugh on tasks in subsequent levels by question-and-answer with corrective feedback, and in addition was given a general principle governing the understanding of the mental state involved in the task. The teaching strategy in the pretence group, by contrast, was spontaneous and unstructured. The aim here was simply to encourage children to produce and participate in pretend play acts with a series of toys related to a theme(e.g shopping or dinner-time), and junk objects, using modelling and verbal guidance. Training took place over eight consecutive days with one half hour session per day.
The result showed that children in the emotion and belief groups improved in their performance on the task they were being trained on. For the children trained in pretence there was no significant improvement in performance. Of course this does not mean that pretending is therefore harder to train than emotion of belief understanding--the children may have failed to produce more pretending because of the materials used or the type of training used, etc. All we can conclude is that the children in this study did not learn to produce more pretend play acts as a result of this particular training technique.
When children from each group were re-tested on the task from all three domains following training, the results revealed that children trained in one domain did not improve in their performance on tasks from another domain. That is, there was no evidence of generalisation between theory of mind domains. The children also showed no significant change in the ability to expand on conversation, and no change in the number of mental-state terms used during conversion. Thus, despite improvement on theory of mind task used during training, there was no evidence of an improvement in conversation skills. However, the children did pass task similar to the ones they had learned to pass during training, but which used different materials. Whilst this suggests that a limited degree of generalisation was possible, it was still not clear what was being generalised--new knowledge about inferring mental state or a non mental-state rule for passing the tasks.
What we cannot tell from either Ozonoff and Miller's or Hadwin et al.'s studies is whether the failure to generalise to novel tasks is a problem specific to autism. It is possible that children without autism, but which the same mental age, would show the same problems in generalising if trained on the same tasks. One way to investigate this possibility is to include control groups who are trained on the same tasks as the children with autism and assessed in the same way.Swettenham attempted to do this by including eight children with autism, eight three-year-olds, and eight children with Down's Syndrome in a theory of mind training study. The aim was was to teach children from each group to pass the Sally-Anne false-belief task with repeated presentations of a computer version of the task. Generalisation was then assessed with five post-training false-belief tasks, all of which had been failed by all children proir to training. Two of these tasks involved the same scenario as the training tasks--a computer version without instruction and the Sally-Anne task with dolls--and were refered to as the close transfer tasks since they required minimal generalisation. The other three transfer tasks also assessed understanding of false belief but used different scenarios to the training task. These were two versions of deceptive-appearance false-belief task based on Perner et al. 1987; and the Tom(theory of mind) task, in which the child is told abouta character's fasle belief, and asked to predict to his behaviour. These tasks were referred to as distant transfer task as they required a greater degree of generalisation. Importantly, it was thought that the distant transfer tasks could not be passed by the use of a non mental-state rule learned during training.
In addition, the children were given four true-belief tasks before and after training. These computer presented tasks involved scenario in which the ball is not transferred from one location to another--for example, Sally hides the ball in location A, Anne removes the ball and then replaces it in the same location(A). All the children passed these true-belief tasks prior to training.
The computer version of the Sally-Anne task was mouse driven and include music,text, and animation, which characters hiding and retrieving a ball in one of two locations as in the conventional presentation. The initial hiding place for the task varied randomly. The child was instructed to click the mouse on characters, or on a door on the screen, in order to move through the sequences of the task. Throughout each presentation prompts appeared on the screen explaining what the characters were thinking. For example, after initially hiding the ball Sally says, "Now I think the ball is in the red/blue box", and, "I must rember to look in the red/blue box if I want my ball". When Anne transfers the ball she explains, and, "Sally hasn't seen me move her ball", "Sally will think that the ball is in the red/blue box". At the end of each presentation of the task the child was asked to select the container where Sally thinks her ball is. If the child is correct the character approaches the container, looks inside and exclaims,"Oh no, the ball is not there anymore." If the child choose incorrectlys,Sally replies,"I think the ball is in the red/blue box because that's where I left it."
Each child received a set number of 48 trials, divided into eight sessions over the course of week. All three groups showed a steady rate of increase in the number of correct trials per session--althrough, surprisingly, it was the group of children with Down's Syndrome who had the lowest mean score throughout training. The children with autism and the three-year-olds consistently passed 5 out of 6 trials per session earlier than the children with Down's Syndrome. Children from all three groups were able to pass the close transfer tasks following training, suggesting that they were all capable of generalising what they had learned to tasks similare to those used for training, but which involved different materials. In contrast, none of the children with autism passed any of the distant transfer tasks, whilst five of the three-year-olds and five of the children with Down's Syndrome passed at least one of the distant transfer tasks following training. The same results were found when the children were re-tested on the transfer tasks three month later.
Since the children with Down's Syndrome and the three-old-years were able to generalise what they had learned to pass tasks which involved different scenarios to the trained task, it seems likely that they had learned to infer mental states during training. Howeverm the children with autism failed to generalise what they had learned to help them pass the distant transfer tasks. One possible reason for this may have been that children with autism learned the simple rule;"Sally always thinks the ball is in the container that is empty'. This rule would alway lead to success on the Sally-Anne false-belief task. However, if this rule was then generalised to a rule-belief task, in which the ball is replaced in its original location, then the rule would lead to an incorrect answer. The results showed that children with autism continued to pass the true-belief tasks following training. This meant that either they had not learned that rule("Sally always think the ball is in the container that is empty") during training, or that they had not applied the rule to the true-belief task. So, this study showed that children with autism could learn to pass the false-belief task, but, unlike normal three-year-olds or children with Down' Syndrime, they were unable to generalise what they learned.
There is another method that tell us whether children with autism can learn to understand false-belief, rather than learn a non mental-state rule, without requiring evidence of generalisation. In order to learn a non mental-state rule during a training study, a child would have to be given the correct solutions to the trials. If children with autism can learn to pass false-belief tasks without being given information on or reinforcement for the correct response, then this would presumably be evidence that the children had learned to infer false belief.
Bowler and Stromm attempted to help children pass the Sally-Anne false-belief task without directly providing the correct answer on each trial. Instead, they provided action and emotional cues to the protagonist's false beliefs(based on Moses and Flavell 1990), and also gave the children the opportunity to experience their own false belief in a similar scenario. All the children in the study initially failed the Sally-Anne false-belief task. All the tasks were presented with real people playing the roles of Sally and Anne. [I](to be continued)[/I]作者: 5i52 时间: 2006-5-29 09:30 标题: re:The study included c... The study included children with autism, children with learning difficulties,normally-developing three-year-olds(nearly four years of age) and young three-year-olds(under three years, six months). Children from each group were divided into an experimental or a control condition. In the experimental condition, children received five trials. The first was the action false-belief trial in which the assistant playing the role of Sally return to the room and stood next to the container where the ball had originally been hidden. The second was the surprise false-belief trial in which the assistant playing Sally returned to the room, looked inside the hiding place, showed a surprised expression and said 'Gosh, my(object) isn't here!'. The third was the own false-belief condition in which the child hid an object, left the room, and returned to find it had been moved. The fourth trial was a repeat of the action false-belief trial, and the final trial was a repeat of the surprise false-belief trial. The correct answer was not directly given on any of these trials. Children in the control condition were given the repeated presentations of the standard condition of the false-belief trial and the own false-belief trial.
The result showed that in the experimental condition children with autism as well as some of the normally-developing older three-year-olds, benifited to a significant extent from the enhanced and emotional cues. Younger three-year-olds and children was learning difficulties did not benefit from the cues. In contrast, none of the children in any of the four groups, in the control condition, benefited from simple repeated presentations of the false-belief task. One explanation for the success of the children with autism and older three-old-years in the experimental condition is that they genuinely learned about mental states as a result of the enhanced action and emotional cues. And since no direct indication of the result was given during training it would not be possible to learn a non mental-state rule for the correct answer. Unfortunately a simpler explanation for improve performance can be given. As Bowler and Stromm point out, the children may have been responding to the surface sttructure of the trial. That is there is considerable stimulus enhancement of the correct location in the experimental condition even though it is not specifically described as the correct location for the task. Children may begin to choose the correct location simply because their attention has been drawn to it. This study therefore does not provide cast-iron evidence that children with autism have learned to employ a theory of mind as a result of being provided with action and emotion cues.
Whiten et al. also used real people in a theory of mind training study. In this study, adults with autism and three-year-olds matched for verbal mental age took part in a series of trials, some of which involved hiding a familiar caretaker's coat and a series which involved hiding the caretaker's cup of coffee. The participants were taking part in another experiment when the caretaker entered to see how things were going. The caretaker then announced that s/he had to leave, providing an excuse(e.g. making a phone call), and made a point of leaving his/her coat--"I'll leave my coat on this chair and come back and get it in a minute." Once s/he had left, the experimenter suggested that they play a trick and hide the coat in a box, Having checked that the participant knew where the coat originally was, and where it was now, the experimenter asked, "when (caretaker's name) comers back, where will s/he look for his/her coat?' If the participant was wrong, then the experimenter provide the correct answer; "I think s/he'll look on the chair.' Participant were gived up to six trials of the coat test followed by up to six trials of an equivalent test using a cup left on a table.Trials were terminated once two successive correct responses were made.
Both the adults with autism and the three-year-olds benefited from the Coat series, as fewer trials were need to achieve success on the Cup series. Both groups also showed a significant improvement on the traditional Sally-Anne task which was used as a transfer task and presented as a series of pictures. Generalisation had therefore taken place from a real life scenario to an artificial task using a very similar scenario. This means that even if they had learned a non mental-state rule, the participants must have recognised that the real life scenario was equivalent to the picture story.
It is not clear then whether any of the training studies described so far have genuinely taught theory of mind understanding to children with autism. It is certainly the case that children with autism can learn to pass theory if mind tasks, but their ability to generalies is limited. One possibility is that they can learn about mental states, but have a general dificit in generalisation. Alternatively, it is possible that children with autism have a specific deficit in understanding mental states so that they focus on non mental-state aspects of training tasks in order to acquire a rule or strategy to pass the tasks. The problem is that the rule or strategy they acquire is not useful for passing other tasks or for reasoning about mental states in everyday interactions.
THOUGHTS ARE LIKE PICTURES IN THE HEAD
An alternative approach then might be to try to teach children with autism to employ a specific strategy, which would be useful in a variety of situations, based on an aspect of their intact abilities. Swettenham et al. attempted to teach children with autism the analogy that people have photos in their heads. This strategy draws on a domain of intact cognition (understanding photographic representations) in an attempt to bypass a cognitive impairment in another domain ( Understanding mental representations). Leslie and Thaiss and Leekam and Perner have shown that whilst children with autism were unable to understand that a person's belief can differ from reality, most could understand that a photograph can differ from reality. That is, they were able to understand that an object's location would remain the same in a photograph, even when this had changed in reality. Of course mental states are not exactly like photos in many respects. For example, mental states are unobservable, they are only held by animate agents, and they may not be visual-image based. And whereas for adults, photos serve only as a resonable metaphor for what belief are like(they are about things, they endure even when reality changes, they can be true or false, etc.), for children with autism they may be the closest approximation to what beliefs are actually like, if they cannot conceive of belief normally.
The aim then, was to teach the metaphor that 'people have picture in their head' in the hope that this would be a useful prosthetic device to compensate for the lack of a 'real' theory of mind (much as Braille is used to enable a blind person to read). The study focused on teaching children the ability to understand false beliefs. The prediction was that if the children were able to learn the photo-in-the-head strategy, they would not only learn to solve a specific task, but would also have learned a powerful generalisable strategy that would enable them to deal with a variety of theory of mind problem. Explicit teaching of the photo strategy was given only in the context of the Sally-Anne false-belief task. However, four different types of transfer tasks were given before and after teaching in order to assess whether children were able to generalise the strategy. These four tests were:(i)the Sally-Anne false-belief task; (ii)a deceptive contents task, the "Smarties" task, (iii) a 'seeing-leads-to-knowing' task; and (iv) an appearance-reality task.
Children with autism were gradually introduced to the photo-in-the-head analogy over the course of five separate sessions. A large manikin's head was used with a slot in the top for inserting photos. Children were taught a set of principles which govern how the photo-in-the-head analogy worked. Teaching consisted of demonstrations and questions to check that the child had learned each principle before moving onto the next. The children were taught that when the manikin(called Sally) looks at something she get a picture of the object in her head. Next children were shown that when Sally is absent and the world changes, the picture remains in Sally's head. Children were then shown the false-belief scenario using the manikin and asked to insert the appropriate photo of an object in a location into Sally's head, and to name what the photo in Sally's head was of when she returned to look for her ball. Finally, the children were taught that by referring to the photo in Sally's head it was possible to tell what Sally was thinking (i.e. 'that the object is in the location as shown in the photo'), and that the photo would also be an indication of how Sally would act (i.e.'that Sally would search for the object in the location shown in the photograph'). Interestingly, children had difficulty with the idea that the photo showed what Sally was thinking. This may have been lack of familiarity with the word 'thinking'.
All the children were able to learn the basic steps of the photo-in-the-head strategy. Although the strategy was not spontaneously used to predict behaviour or mental states, when an explicit link was made(that Sally will refer to the photo in her head to tell her where to look for the hidden object), seven out of eight children were able to pass the Sally-Anne task. Furthermore, there was a significant improvement in performance on the traditional dolls version of the Sally-Anne false-belief task, and an improvement on the seeing-lead-to-knowing task.
This result suggested that the children had learned the photo-in-the-head rule and that this could be generalised to a task which had not beem used during training(seeing-leads-to-knowing). It would appear that the children with autism had used the rules that "when someone sees something they get a picture in their head" and 'the picture in the head is what someone is thinking' to help them choose that the character who sees inside the box is the one who knows what is inside. However, it was also the case that there was no significant improvement on the Deceptive Appearance task or on the Appearance-Reality task. Lack of improvement on the Deceptive Appearance task suggests that the children's ability to generalise remains limited, whilst lack of improvement on the Appearance-Reality task suggests the limitations of the metaphor, since a sponge that looks like a rock will look the same in a photo.
McGregor et al. have used a picture-in-the-head technique in a training study attempting to teach theory of mind to children with autism, and also compared this technique with another teaching method that involved highlighting the protagonist' intentions in the Sally-Anne type false-belief scenario. Two experimental groups, matched for mental age, were given training using both techniques: (i) a group of adults with autism; and (ii) a group of three-years-olds. Two non-intervention control groups were also included to control for natural change over the course ofthe training.
Training using this technique focused on two versions of the Sally-Anne false-belief task and involved slotting pictures of the location of hidden objects in doll's heads. The technique of highlighting also focused on the Sally-Anne scenario and involved emphasising the location that Sally hides her object and her expectation that it will remain there. Transfer tasks were given before and after training for both experimental and non-intervention control groups. These tasks were:(i)the traditional Sally-Anne tasks(without photographs); (ii) a deceptive-appearance task;(iii)the windows deception task; (iv) the coat task( a real life false-belief task in which a character's coat is moved in his/her absence), and (v) an appearance-reality task.
Result showed that the picture-in-the-head technique was substantially more effective for teaching theory of mind compared with the technique of highlighting intention. Both the three-year-old children and the individuals with autism who had been trained were able to pass the standard Sally-Anne fasle-belief task following training. The three-year-olds also showed substantial evidence of generalisation to other false-belief tasks. However, for individuals with autism generalisation was limited to being able to pass a test of their own false belief.
Another representational device that might help compensate or bypass deficits in understanding and employing mental states is 'thought-bubbles'--after all, thought-bubbles are often used to depict a person's thoughts in cartoons and magazines. In face, typically-developing children as young as three years of age appear to have no difficulty in understanding that thoughts can be represented in 'thought-bubbles'. Using thoughts bubbles to teach theory of mind has already been piloted in a single case study in which a child with autism successfully learned how to select thought bubbles which represented a character's thoughts in a false-belief task. Larger scale studies are currently underway to investigate the efficacy of using thought bubbles as an aid to mentalising.
TRAINING STUDIES WITH NORMAL CHILDREN
A number of recent studies have focused on teaching theory of mind to normally-developing three-year-olds Whilst these studies can ultimately only tell us about normal development, they may provide some clues for research with individuals with autism--what works with normal three-year-olds might work with children with autism. Most of the research with normal children has been conducted to test an empiricist view that theory of mind is a consciously constructed theory made up of interrelated concepts. For example, Wellman argue that a concept like 'belief' is understood in relation to other concepts like 'perception', 'action', 'desire', and 'intention'. A number of training studies have shown that emphasising the relation between 'belief' and other mental state concepts within a theory has led to improved performance on false-belief tasks.
Gopnik et al. found an improvement in understanding other's false belief on a deceptive-appearance when children were taught that their own changed visual perspective is like a change in what they thought about an object. When belief was paired with other mental states such as desires and emotions in a deceptive transfer false-belief task, Bartsch also found improved performance in three-year-olds on the false-belief task. Morses also tested three-year-olds' understanding of false belief in the context of intentions. When children were presented with a film showing an actor's surprise or sadness at having failed to complete an intended act, and then questioned about unfulfilled intentions, they performed better on false-belief tasks. Finally, Slaughter and Gopnik found that three-year-olds improved in their performance on a variety of theory of mind tasks, including false-belief understanding when trained on the related concepts of desire and intention.
These results are interesting because they suggest that in normal development it may be possible to teach a concept such as false belief by enhancing understanding of related concepts to help children form a theory. It remains to be seen whether such methods will be succssful in teaching children with autism. Hadwin et al. did attempt to teach children in different related concepts(pretence, emotion, and belief) but found that no benefit in belief understanding was gained by teaching about emotion or pretence. [I](to be continued)[/I]作者: 5i52 时间: 2006-5-29 09:31 标题: re:[B]CONCLUSIONS[/B]... CONCLUSIONS
The training studies described in this chapter have all demonstrated that individuals with autism can be taught to pass theory of mind tasks. However, it is not clear what has been learned during these training studies---the ability to infer mental states and predict action from mental states, or a non mental-state rule that can be used to obtain the correct answer. Evidence of generalisation to tasks similare to the ones that had been trained does not help disambiguate these two possibilities. Children may have learned a non mental-state rule to pass the training tasks and used that rules to pass the transfer task. Individuals with autism showed limited generalisation to novel theory of mind tasks, on which they had not been trained, and no significant improvement in everyday social interaction following training. This may be because they learned a non mental-state rule during training, or because they suffer from a general deficit in generalisation.
Two studies assessed whether teaching theory of mind would lead to improvements in social interaction, and found no difference in social interaction after training. Of course this null result dones not mean that social interaction cannot be improved through training theory of mind. It is possible that more extensive training ove a longer period, or the use more sensitive assessment measures, might prove more successful, and there are some groups for optimism. For example, although the training studies found no evidence of transfer from artificial tasks to 'real life' social interaction skills, it is worth noting that several studies showed transfer from 'real life' scenario to artificial tasks. Furthermore, individuals who pass false-belief tasks(without training) score more highly, than those who fail, on the Vineland Adaptive Behaviour Scales, a correlation which suggests that theory of mind ability does relate to social communication skills. So. despite the relative lack of success in training studies so far, it would be unwise to assume that future studies will not be more successful.
Although the training studies described here do not provide a direct test of what causes the theory of mind dificit itself, they may provide clues. For example it is clear that individuals with autism have difficulty in generalising new knowledge. A general deficit in the ability to generalise,which is specific to autism, is one candidate for an underlying primary psychological deficit in autism. However, in order to test this idea further we need to know whether individuals with autism have difficulty learning and generalising concepts or rules which don't involve mental states. If training studies that focus on teaching aspect of psychological functioning other than theory of mind lead to a genuine ability to infer mental states and predict action then this might be good evidence for a primary psychological deficit in autism. For example, if individuals with autism have a primary deficit in selective attention, then focusing teaching on what aspect of a social scenario to attend to and what to ignore may lead to improvement on theory of mind tasks. If there is some other psychological function or behaviour, the disruption of which early in development consequently impairs theory of mind development, then it may be preferable to conduct an early intervention to attempt to alleviate that early occurring impairment. For example, one current early intervention study is attemption to teach eighteen-month-olds with autism to attend to faces and to engage in joint attention as part of an intervention, and it will be interesting to examine the effect this training has on theory of mind development. Similarly, if the perceptual and attentional impairments which seem apparent in autism can be alleviated early in development, then the relationship between these apparently non-social impairments and the development of theory of mind can be examined.
One promising new approach for older individuals with autism has been to provide an analogy that 'thoughts are like picture'. This may lead to a genuine understanding of mental states, or individuals may continue to use the analogy as a useful aid to solving teory of mind problems. Ultimately the success of the picture analogy or any other approach will be measured by how effective it is in helping individuals with autism to understand and predict the behaviour of others.
Note:
1. Theory of mind training studies cannot however reveal much about what cause the theoryof mind deficit itself, only whether a deficit in theory of mind relates to impairments in social communication.
2. It might be argue that this is less likely in the caseof Ozonoff and Miller's study, because the children with autism were high-functioning. However, problem in generalisation(or any psychological process) may result from having any severe developmental disorder.
[I](end of chapter)[/I]