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Recent research focuses on the neural correlates of theory of mind NEIL MARTIN
THE last decade has witnessed a resurgent interest in understanding how and when we develop a theory of mind (ToM) - the beliefs we hold about other people's mental states and the representations of their mental states. The increase in interest has stemmed, in part from work in autism - a characteristic of autism appears to be a lack of ToM. Researchers have extended this line of research to other (non-autistic) samples, the importance of which lies in the possibility of explaining why ToM deficits occur.
Candida Peterson and Michael Siegal from the Universities of Queensland and Sheffield, for example, have compared the performance of 9-year-old deaf children, 9-year-old children with autism and 4-year-- old healthy controls on a series of standard ToM tasks.
The deaf group was subdivided into those children who were native signers (they had at least one other household member who was a signer), children who were signers but had hearing families, and children with moderate to severe hearing loss who had been exposed to spoken language.
The researchers found that deaf children who were signers, deaf children who had grown up with some spoken language input, and normal hearing children performed similarly on the ToM tasks. These groups, however, performed significantly better than did deaf signers from hearing families, and children with autism.
The researchers suggest that there may be two reasons for these findings. The first is that ToM has some neural basis and that the deficit seen in the autistic and deaf children with hearing families has a neurobiological basis. The second is that the opportunity for conversation and exchange of thoughts and ideas about mental states was limited in the group with autism and in the group of deaf children whose families were not deaf.
Whether autism is a neurological disorder, however, is still open to question. Some researchers argue strongly that it is a brain-based developmental disorder (e.g. Happe, 1999). Because autism is regarded as a brain disorder...