4.1 Becoming social: how children learn to read others’ minds

Discussion

The task above, based on the work of Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues (1997), is designed to measure relatively advanced (adult) levels of a cognitive ability that psychologists call theory of mind (ToM). ToM refers to the capacity of human beings to use information in order to ‘read’ what other people might be thinking or feeling in a given context. This may sound simple, however ‘mind reading’ involves a highly sophisticated range of cognitive skills, including the ability to take the spatial, social and emotional perspective of another person, to organise and evaluate contextual cues about what they might be thinking or feeling, and to decode subtle non-verbal behaviours. With no more information than a truncated picture of someone’s eyes, for example, many of you will have successfully decoded the feelings of at least some of the people pictured above.

Although ToM is widely viewed as an innate, cross-culturally universal ability, children are not born with this ability fully formed. It is something that builds over time and gradually increases in sophistication as the child learns through interaction with others. Infants and young children, for example, would struggle to complete the task presented above (even if they understood the meaning of terms such as ‘playful’ and ‘serious’). They have not yet learned how to decode the ‘language of the eyes’ (Baron-Cohen et al., 1997), which is one of the many skills that underpin ToM. In order to map the developmental trajectory of ToM in children, psychologists have had to devise other methods.