Higher order Theory of Mind (test yourself)

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[quote="anbuend"]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. [/quote]

You may well be correct. Like you I found those tales as confusing as real life grandfather of fred's mother's second son who said..., glaze over, whatever, who cares. Or as I tend to say "don't bother". I suspect that memory comes into this.

A key is the conjunction of Autism and semantic/pragmatic which is still moving to be being recognised.

There again we might be misunderstanding what is being talked about. If NT comprehend automagically without consciously computing we have no ToM. Or perhaps between the two.

Here's the logic problem:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9uqPeIYMik
What bowled me over is that I thought of a similar answer to Kasper's, and instinctively disliked the professor's cumbersome double-negative trap.

That was wonderful. I think I could have only come up with something like Kaspar did. I don't really consider myself illogical but deduction is very hard for me because all the variables slip away like slippery eels. BTW, did you know the actor who played Kaspar was in a mental institution for a long time? I wonder what his condition is (was) and whether he would be assessed differently now.

Unfortunately it's "was" rather than "is" :
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obitu ... 60053.html

I was quite shocked at how Aspie-like he seems to have been, though I guess his early life more than accounts for that.

Thanks for the link. I tried to find some of his artwork on Google images but had no luck. There was one but it said 404 error not found. He sounds like he had a lot of spirit. I actually knew an old man once with a similar life circumstance. He was born of a prostitute mother and raised in a mental institution.

That seems to happen a lot with his art......these seem to work, though they're rather small images:
http://www.galerie-susanne-zander.com/e ... stein.html
http://crowwithnomouth-jesse.blogspot.c ... stein.html

Thanks.

I remember the after feeling of watching the movie "DUNE,"as one example. It was a feeling of after walking out the door, due to needing a score card to keep up with the movie.

The "dissonance" here T.D. is definitely uncomfortable, and you really know you're missing something when the audience grabs it, and/or your mate.

This blank in cognition causes that intense focus to understand "it"- at all costs- much like Captain Ahab's drive into madness.
Maybe it's an instinct to fill in the blanks to allow it to be 'bridged' successfully in the future, IDK. Funny thing is, is that I haven't had these "glitches" in a long time, so maybe it's either my personal CBT worked or it amended itself in another way.

Come to think of it, maybe "taking the heat^" off as you said is the key. I think of things as these in terms of test anxiety and maybe letting this go is the factor.

As a wacky analogy: I think of Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk caught in a force field in the old series, and they deduced that rather than fight it, to move slowly out of it. Funnily this seems to work for me.

I think that everybody, Aspie or not, felt like that after seeing Dune. They just tried to put too much of the book into the movie. Also the book is really not plot driven. It's more about politics, religion, and philosophy, which don't translate well into a movie.

One thing that I find that helps me when I get stuck on something is to recite to myself, "it really isn't that important." I say it over and over again, and eventually, I start to believe it.

I hated "Dune." I had some consolation when it became apparent that practically the whole audience was confused and were saying things like "blimey, that was obscure!" on the way out of the cinema. I think they should certify obscureness in the same way as they certify sex and violence.

I don't know what the cause of getting stuck on a lost bit of plot is either. It's as if my brain feels that the whole venture is deeply flawed once I notice that I've missed something, so it feels (and often is) wasteful to just try to plough on regardless. Of course if a chunk of the plot fails to convey itself, then there is a very real risk that it'll come back to bite me later on. Possibly Aspie perfectionism has a role here too - spotting minor flaws and wanting to annihilate them.

Also I read once that professional musicians behave differently to amateurs when they make a mistake while sight-reading sheet music - the amateurs tend to dwell on the mistake they've just made, and therefore lose focus and make further mistakes, while the pros just accept that they goofed and move on without worrying about it. They found that there was no difference in the frequency of "original" mistakes between the 2 groups, i.e. it was only the amateurs' concern and their tendency to glimpse back at the problem that had gone by, that made their rendition inferior. Maybe that's roughly what happens to us when we try to comprehend anything difficult?

Yeah, I was stuck on the cool imagery as some of the effects were interesting for '84. Aside from that I was lost- with myself I took it as "another one chalked up to missing a bunch." The above poster mentioned the "same," generally - I don't think this one is the 'acid test.'
In principal though I got the gist of "exactly" your experiences, I believe.


Bingo. I'd say this is the 'model' or the dynamic.

I believe that "getting stuck" with the followed mired cognition is the force of our thoughts and emotions or the "inertia" at work - "that Aspie thing."
Maybe the probable mechanism:

There is a 'mini column mechanism' that is different from the controls in a study of imaging the different brains . A "mini column" is a basic unit of storage, probably analogous to a byte. The 'autism group' has significantly "more" than the NT controls- there are "more" of these per volume /area. The paradigm suggests or asserts that this is the causation of the bias to encode for details and this perhaps causing an inertia of this phenomenon? It does assert that this 'pack of density' causes the exaggerated intensity and a resultant dis- inhibition of certain behaviors.

Could be.......another thing I notice is, I find it incredibly difficult to just drop a thought, especially if I don't feel I've chewed it over pretty much to completion. Naturally that makes it hard to follow anything "linear" such as books and films, and it also seems to be a part of my "talking past the point" problem - when I can't stop talking, it's because I've got a thought and I can't drop it (i.e. stop talking about it) until I've really made it "clear" (though I'm more clarifying it in my own mind than for the listener). Also the apparently poor "working memory" of many of us - perhaps the data isn't lost, but is just hard to switch back to if an interfering idea happens to grab our attention at the wrong time. Though that doesn't explain why we're able to switch our focus onto the interfering thoiught but not back again. When I get that memory problem, the tangent I've flown off at (and failed to return from) has usually seemed at first to be just a brief detour - the brain seems to see the new thought as strongly related to the main issue, but then it "expands" the new thought until it's too far away from the original concept. You'd think I'd be adept at nipping such thoughts in the bud by now, but once it's there, I just find myself exploring it to the full. Again, the prime directive seems to be that dropping the thought, however insignificant or distracting it may be, just isn't allowed.

To the OP:
Sorry to have strayed so far off topic. Please let us know if you're not happy with this, and we'll create a new thread.

I got bored with the stories plot very quickly so I couldn't make myself follow them. I could answer the lower-level questions up to level 3 but with level 4 the only reply I could give was 'I could not care less'. If it was a real test situation and if I was pressed to answer, I would say that I didn't know the answer - so as to get the examiner off my back.
My working memory seems to be OK. I have always had memory for detail though.

Most of the grammar that you object is correct British usage. To my ear "have gotten" sounds just as old fashioned and King Jamesy as "spelt" looks to you. (Though as an Irish woman I spell the word as "spelled", as you do. How's that for a confusing sentence!) "Class four were" is, however, incorrect, for the reason you cite.

I would suggest it's an overly wordy article no matter where you hail from. I found it a bit turgid as well... and as a result didn't bother to answer the questions because my head ached already by the time I got to them.

And, on top of it, turns out that my own English is archaic.

I thought "gotten" was American slang. But apparently it's official, and the rules are quite sophisticated:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/aue/gotten.html
To my mind, it's more logical and economical to just use "get" for the present tense and "got" for the past tense....."gotten" always seems like it's overdoing the job, like saying "stucked" instead of "stuck."
No offense though, it really doesn't matter. It doesn't slow me down much when I read it.