Theory of mind development: A comparison of children with autism spectrum disorders and typically developing South African children

Theory of mind (ToM) is the ability to recognize other people’s mental states, and to understand that people’s behaviour is influenced by their emotions, beliefs and desires. Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show severe deficits in ToM ability; these deficits can account for the social, communicative and imaginative deficits seen in ASD. Previous studies have found that individuals with ASD have a specific deficits and delays in ToM development. However, it is still unclear whether, or to what extent, ToM development takes place in children with ASD, and how age and verbal IQ impact on ToM ability. Using a novel and developmentally sequenced ToM battery, the aims of this study were to (a) compare the developmental trajectory of ToM in typically developing South African children, aged 3-13 years, with that of children from other countries (reported in previous studies), and (b) compare ToM ability in South African typically developing and ASD children. As expected, children with ASD performed consistently more poorly on the ToM tasks than typically developing children. Furthermore, ToM ability in the current typically developing sample was roughly on par with similarly-aged children from other countries. Interestingly, South African children performed worse than children from other countries on the more advanced ToM tasks, which may be due to cultural insensitivity of those tasks.