Changing focus on the representational mind: Deaf, autistic and normal children's concepts of false photos, false drawings and false beliefs

Abstract

We report two experiments designed to explore further the parallels noted previously between deaf and autistic children's mastery of a theory of mind and to compare their emerging concepts of false belief with their understanding of false representation in the photographic and artistic domains. In Expt 1, standard false‐belief and false‐photograph tasks were given to 21 high functioning autistic children, 35 normal preschoolers and 30 signing deaf children from hearing families. The children with deafness performed similarly to those with autism. The vast majority of both groups passed the false‐photograph test, but less than half displayed a correspondingly accurate understanding of false belief. Normal 4‐year‐olds did equally well on photo and belief tasks, significantly surpassing deaf and autistic children's performance on the latter. However, in contrast to some previous research, the normal 3‐year‐olds also found the false‐photograph task easier than the false‐belief task in Expt 1. Experiment 2 was therefore designed to provide a more tightly controlled comparison of the relative difficulty of concepts of false representation in three modalities— photographic, mental and pictorial—using identical procedures in each modality so as to equate the tasks' conceptual, syntactic and pragmatic demands. A total of 24 deaf children, 21 autistic children and 47 normal preschoolers participated in Expt 2. The results replicated those of Expt 1 by showing no difference between deaf and autistic children, both of whom displayed a poorer understanding of false beliefs than of false photographs. But the normal 3‐year‐olds in Expt 2 did no better on the photo than the belief tasks, suggesting procedural factors as an explanation for this age group's Expt 1 performance. The absence of significant differences among the diagnostic groups on the false‐drawing task highlighted the need for further research into the development of representational concepts in the artistic domain. Consideration was given to how impoverished early conversational experience and selective deprivation of talk about intangible mental states might influence deaf and autistic children's development of a theory of mind.