In this research project, Prof. David Williams how children with ASD and those who are typically-developing perform on tasks aimed at recognising their own false beliefs compared and others' beliefs. Importantly, the researchers employ a novel false belief task (the Plaster task). The findings have important implications for research as well as educators.
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About
Theory of mind (ToM) is the ability to attribute mental states both to others and to the self. It involves understanding that others can have different thoughts and knowledge compared to ourselves and helps us understand and predict behaviour. Furthermore, ToM allows one to recognize that both the self and others can have false beliefs about the world.
A large body of research shows that Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by marked impairments in ToM. However, the current study suggests that the most widely used false belief task (Smarties task) to measure ToM may not be effective in children with ASD. Accordingly, this may result in artificially inflated levels of performance. Specifically, the current study hypothesises that children with ASD might have greater difficulty representing their own beliefs compared to others’ beliefs. The authors propose an improved version of the traditional task to study this hypothesis.
Research Objectives
• To explore whether children with ASD would be unique in performing significantly less well on recognising self false beliefs compare to others’ false beliefs using a new task (Plasters task).
• Children with developmental disability (DD) and typically developing (TD) children were expected to perform equally well on both tests of false beliefs.
• To compare the Plasters task to the traditional Smarties task and explore whether children with ASD would perform similar to TD and DD on the Smarties task.
Programme and Methodology
Participants:
• 52 children with ASD
• 25 children with developmental disability
• 41 typically developing children
• All participants completed: the Plasters task (see full paper for details of the task).
• A sub-sample of children with ASD and all TD children completed the Smarties task.
Findings
• In line with the main prediction of the study, participants with ASD found it significantly more difficult to report their own false belief than to predict the false belief of another person using the new Plasters task.
• TD and DD participants performed similarly across the self and other false belief questions using the Plasters task.
• All participants performed similarly across the self and other false belief question in the classic Smarties test.
Impact
• This project offered new and important evidence:
• Children with ASD found it relatively more difficult to recognise their own (false) beliefs than the (false) beliefs of other people.
• Using scaffolding (the confound factor in the classic Smarties task), individuals with ASD were capable of passing false belief test questions.
Note: caution should be taken when interpreting which cognitive processes individuals with ASD employ to pass the questions.
• This project offers important implications for educators:
• These findings showcase ways in which individuals with ASD learn about the world and how they understand their own and others’ behaviour. These should be taken into consideration within and outside the classroom