Higher order Theory of Mind (test yourself)

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Hey all,

So as far as I understand, by adulthood many Aspies figure out first order Theory of Mind - for example, the infamous Sally-Anne test. What I'm curious about is how grown-up Aspies do on higher order tests. In the paper below, Appendix 1 contains a number of stories that test 4th order (and lower) Theory of Mind. I'd be interested if people tried doing the ToM questions in the stories - I don't think the answers are given in the paper, but I'd be happy to post them after people have tried them!

http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/daniel.nettl ... nettle.pdf

I have difficulty answering some of them. I think that I would get every answer correct, but for instance Story 4 ToM Level 3 and Story 5 ToM Level 2 do not make sense to me - I can pick one answer that is not disagreeing with the stated facts in the story, but that answer does not seem completely correct either.

Easy!

Just; I dont always trust these kinds of informations:
"Bobby’s mum knows that chocolate is Bobby’s favourite thing in all the world."

Because its a second hand information.

The first hand information is only that Bobby loves chocolate.

Therefore I was thinking that a 5th level of theory of mind could be the awareness of the possibility that what Bobbys mum knows about Bobbys thoughts, might not be true.

I have trouble with the writing. Too many British-isms. Over here in America... A mum is a flower, not a mother. "Spelt" is a grain, not the past tense of "spell." (Sounds like the King James Bible!) And how can chocolate spoil a cup of tea? Luckily I know it really meant dinner, but it still distracts me to read stuff like that, need to stop my train of thought and think twice about what it means.

And some of the grammer! It's "have gotten," not "have got." It's "Mrs. Brown," not "Mrs Brown." And "Class 4 was," not "Class 4 were" since there is only one class and thus the verb should be singular, not plural. Or are these also British-isms?

My main difficulty was to follow the stories.

However, the fact that we know that we are solving "theory of mind" questions could distort the results.

This is something I copied and pasted here from another post. There is evidence of theory of mind in here.

It's dishonest. Completely dishonest and I've been calling it dishonest for a long time.

It's already shown that the biggest reason that autistic children do badly on the basic ToM tests is language. They involve some of the hardest language constructions in the English language. Given a non-language ToM test, autistic children either do as well as, or even slightly outperform, nonautistic children. See:

http://psych.wisc.edu/lang/pdf/Gernsbac ... odules.pdf

And before I ever knew of the above paper, I noticed that the supposed second-order, third-order, and fourth-order so-called "theory of mind" tests, are simply more and more complex language and cognitive constructions. They require a whole lot of cognitive multitasking (something most if not all autistic people are bad at) as well as a high level of language understanding (something that many autistic people are bad at).

All the researchers have done is say "see, autistic people seem to have theory of mind, and so let's find something that trips most autistic people up and call it a theory of mind task." At least that's what it looks like from my perspective. If they didn't do that intentionally, it's certainly what they did in reality. It really disgusts me too, that rather than acknowledging that most autistic people have theory of mind, they simply add more and more complex linguistic and cognitive constructs until something, anything, makes it hard for us to do the task. So then we can be said to lack theory of mind again. I hate it. And I hate that so many people buy into it despite the evidence in the other direction.

Oh, and I find them all confusing, but I know for a fact that I know that other people have minds and that other people have thoughts different than my own (therefore I have theory of mind no matter what some researcher says -- OTOH I have pretty intense receptive language and multitasking problems).

All those pronouns!! This is bad writing. Deliberately confusing. And keeping track of the characters is difficult, too. "He", "she", random names... there are no intrinsic meanings to those words! This has much more to do with how well you can keep track of people, their names, and their actions simultaneously than it has to do with what you can guess about another person's state of mind. It reminds me of those deliberately badly-written questions on the GRE...

I can do all the questions up to 4th order, but only if I treat it as a logic puzzle. It's about as difficult as solving a calculus problem.

Ah, interesting... The Britishisms don't bother me at all (nor did the grammar), but I'll admit that constructions like "A thinks that B believes than C thinks ..." give just about everyone, NT or AS, a headache. On the other hand, I find that somewhere in my head there's a little flow-chart that lets visualize what that means without having to think too hard. Anyone else feel that way?

So what are the answers?