Theory Of Mind Essay

Decent Essays
Theory of Mind

In order to understand the autistic brain its assential to understand theory of mind. Theory of mind is one of the many theories that atempts to explain the causes of autism, it refers to the ability to explain and understand mental states of others. For example predicting others attitudes and beliefs towards certain things in order to predict their future behaviour and outcome (Hill & Frith, 2003 ). Most people with autism fail to recognise or predict other people’s behaviour, as well as lacking mental states of themselves, that is automatic in normally developing children (Hill & Frith, 2003). This theory sometimes refered to as “mindblindness” has been tested several times. Baron-Cohen have tested this hypothesis using
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Sally puts a marble ball in her basket and goes outside, Ann takes the ball and puts it in her box, when sally returns where does she look ? Most normally developed four year olds can answer this question easily, sally looks for her ball where she left not where it is now ( Hill & Frith, 2003 ). however children and adolescents with autism fail to answer this question correctly (Hill & Frith, 2003). The failure to represent sally’s believes has been taken as an evidence of impaired theory of mind in autism (Hill & Frith, 2003). This theory of mind has been used in clinical and practical settings, and it has been used for treating, detecting, recognising and addressing the social and communication difficulties in this disorder. However this theory fails to explain why many people with autism have superior skills in one region, for example the boy who draws like an experienced artists but fails to add five and five, or the other boy who can tell you within seconds what day of the week any past or future date will fall upon (Hill & Frith, 2003). Despite generally low cognitive skills, and low iq how can these abilities be explained, some of which are not mental age level, but exceed expectations based on chronical age …show more content…
Weak central coherence also known as central coherence theory is a developed to provide answers for savant syndrome and other behaviours found in autism (Happe, 1999). Autistic individuals have shown to have excellent performance where rote memory and focused attention to detail is needed while common sense knowledge, working memory and task planning situations result in poor performance (Happe, 1999). As a result many authors have concluded that non-social autism characteristics then carry both strength and weaknesses, and that autistic individuals have weak central coherence (Happe, 1999). Weak central coherence explains the limited ability to understand the context of things and be able to see the bigger picture, instead people with weak central coherence see objects as small or big pieces (Synder, 2009). This perception or cognitive style is found to be the underlying disturbances of autism (Synder, 2009). Weak Central coherence is explained as lack of tendency to process incoming information in a context (Synder, 2009). Which basically means that autistic indivduals have difficulties pulling information together for higher level meaning (Synder, 2009). It has been suggested that the capcity to process global information has been disturbed in autism and instead autistic individuals focus more on local processing. For example if a stimuli is presented or an object the autistic

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