The correct answer “smarties” or “sweets” reflects the ability to represent another person’s belief. The experimenter then asks the child the following question: “What would a child who has not seen inside the tube think is in there before it is opened”. 1 In another well-known false-belief task, which involves unexpected content, the “Smarties” task, 12 the child is shown a tube of Smarties and, in contrast to his/her expectation to find sweets inside the tube, he/she found pencils inside. An incorrect answer would be to point to the marble’s present location, suggesting that the child has not taken the doll’s belief into account. When Sally returned, the experimenter asked the child “Where will Sally look for her marble?„ A correct answer would be to point to the previous location of the marble, suggesting that the child has understood the doll’s false belief. 11 In one classic false-belief task that involves location change, namely, the “Sally-Anne” task, 1 the doll Sally hid a marble and left the room, and the other doll Ann changed the location of this marble. ToM is traditionally assessed using false-belief tasks that require children to attribute a false belief to another person to predict his or her behaviour. Thus, the present study was aimed to assess ToM abilities in children with ASD whose language is within the norm for their age (ASD-LN) 9, 10 compared to children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and typically developing children (TD). 7, 8 One way to tease apart the influence of language on ToM abilities is to assess children with ASD and with no language disorder compared to children with language disorder and no ASD. However, the association between language skills (eg, vocabulary and grammar) and performance on ToM tasks in children with ASD raises the possibility that language abilities affect the performance of ToM tasks in children with ASD. 6 Thus, ToM is still considered crucial for understanding social performance in ASD. ![]() 1, 5 Although to-date questions have arisen regarding the universality and uniqueness of theory-of-mind deficits in autism, and about how this hypothesis could explain early symptoms including restricted interests, or repetitive behaviors, studies repeatedly show reduced performance on tasks that assess ToM in ASD. 2–4 In fact, the ToM Hypothesis for Autism suggests that difficulties in ToM are the core deficit underlying the social, behavioral, and communicative deficits exhibited by individuals with ASD. 1 Children and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often present difficulties in ToM, and this impedes their participation in social contexts. ToM is considered as the capacity to represent and understand mental states, emotions, motivations, and oneself’s and others’ beliefs.
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