Megan Critchlow - Psychology
Thirdly the SAM’s key function is to build triadic representations. A triadic representation is
the ability to recognise the associations between an agent, the self and a third object. It is the
ability to identify that you are sharing a perception with another. (ibid)
Finally the ToMM completes the child’s development of a Theory of Mind. This allows a
child to recognise mental states such as guessing, imagining, deceiving and understanding
false belief. It helps an infant to understand that there are many mental states that are able to
relate to each other. Without being able to recognise these mental states you become
vulnerable to the people who do. (ibid)
In an interview Baron-Cohen theorises that “A Theory of Mind was so central to human
social behaviour, that in all likelihood it had evolved to support social behaviour- and its
impairment in autistics might just be the strand of neurological evidence to allow this
evolutionary question to be tractable” (Gazzaniga et al, 2002, cited by Brooks Jamison,
2010). This statement plausibly implies that perhaps in the past there were many humans
lacking a Theory of Mind, but as we evolved natural selection caused these individuals to be
the minority, leading to the smaller group of people lacking a Theory of Mind being named
autistic.
The mindblindness theory
Before we can look at what training methods can help develop a Theory of Mind, we have to
look more directly at what it is Autistic children lack. To do this I am going to examine the
mindblindness theory and highlight more directly the abilities autistic children lack relating
to “mindblindness”.
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