Abstract
Every day, we engage in social interactions with other people which require understanding their as well as our own mental states. Such capacity is commonly referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM). Disturbances of ToM are often reported in diverse pathologies which affect brain functioning and lead to problems in social interactions. Identifying ToM deficits is thus crucial to guide the clinicians in the establishment of adequate rehabilitation strategies for patients. Previous studies have demonstrated that ToM is not a unitary function yet currently there are very few standardized tests which allow identifying the type of cognitive processes affected when a patient exhibits a ToM deficit. In the current study, we present two belief reasoning tasks which have been used in previous research to disentangle two types of processes involved in belief reasoning: self-perspective inhibition and the spontaneous inference of another person’s belief. A three-step procedure was developed to provide clinicians with the tools to interpret the patients’ performances on the tasks. First, these tasks were standardized and normative data was collected on a sample of 124 healthy participants aged between 18 and 74. Data collected showed a decrease in performance as a function of age only in the task that loaded most in spontaneous other-perspective demands. There was however no effect of gender or educational level. Cut-off scores to identify deficits were then calculated for the different age groups separately. Secondly, the three-step procedure was applied to 21 brain-damaged patients and showed a large diversity of profiles, including selective deficits of the two targeted ToM processes. The diversity of profiles shows the importance to take into account the multiple facets of ToM during the diagnosis and rehabilitation of patients with suspected ToM deficits.
Highlights
IntroductionWe constantly interact with other people around us. Such interactions require us to reason about mental states such as beliefs, emotions and intentions in order to understand and predict the behavior of others and adapt our own behavior an ability usually referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM) [1]
As social beings, we constantly interact with other people around us
We first tested whether performance varied significantly according to the age, the gender and the socio-educational level of the healthy participants in order to specify according to which variable the norms should be computed
Summary
We constantly interact with other people around us. Such interactions require us to reason about mental states such as beliefs, emotions and intentions in order to understand and predict the behavior of others and adapt our own behavior an ability usually referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM) [1]. ToM impairments generate major repercussions in the interpersonal relations of the patients [8]. They are increasing appeals to improve the clinical assessment to detect ToM deficits (see for example [9]). This is in line with the more general recognition within the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-5) [10], of social cognition as one of the six core neurocognitive functions to assess
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