What's Inside Someone's Head? Conceiving of the Mind as a Camera Helps Children with Autism Acquire an Alternative to a Theory of Mind

Abstract

A group of children with autism were taught a specific strategy to help them solve a series of theory of mind problems. We focused our teaching on the false-belief task and taught them the analogy that people have photos in their heads. This strategy draws on a domain of intact cognition in autism (understanding photographic representations) to bypass a cognitive impairment in a certain domain (understanding mental state representations). All the children were able to understand photographic misrepresentation during teaching and, following specific teaching, they could use the strategy of visualising photos in characters' heads to predict the character's behaviour. In contrast, none of the children could use the photo strategy to predict a character's mental states. The educational and theoretical implications of this study are discussed.