978-1572305441

66 A MIND APART
For the most part, we do this quickly and effortlessly—automatically.
Typical children and adolescents do have difficulty reading social cues
as well; of that there is no doubt. The difference is that this occurs from
time to time, not continuously, and mainly for situations that are ambiguous.
The difficulties here stem from a lack of maturity; they are not intrinsic
to the person. For people with ASD, these difficulties occur in
situations that typical children and adolescents would find obvious. It
does not occur just in ambiguous situations but constantly. Moreover,
people with ASD are often not even aware they are having trouble understanding
the rules of social interaction. Typical adolescents are often
acutely aware of their misinterpretation when it is pointed out to them,
though they may not admit it to any parent or adult in authority. The
difference is that for typical adolescents, it is emotions, impulses, or inexperience
that get in the way of understanding social cues, rather than
a fundamental cognitive deficit, as it is for people with ASD.
Young children typically begin to develop a basic understanding of
other people’s mental states between nineteen and twenty-four months
of age, when they acquire the ability to pretend that a specific object is
something else: This banana is no longer a piece of fruit but a telephone.
This capacity to elaborate and use symbols soon evolves into social
play activities such as playing Mommy or Daddy with dolls or with
a younger sibling. By age four or five years, children have a remarkable
sense of psychological mechanisms and can interpret and predict
behavior by attributing mental states to their friends, their siblings,
their parents, and themselves.
What is not clear is the form these skills take at different ages and
how they are acquired. Some psychologists believe that children acquire
psychological concepts much as they learn the meaning of grammar and
words; that is, these are preprogrammed cognitive skills, hard-wired in
the brain, that unfold with development and experience. Similarly, having
a theory of mind may be hard-wired in the brain, but a child needs
experience for it to be fully realized (just like children need to be exposed
to language to utilize their hard-wired skills). Others believe that
a theory of mind arises in a child from an ability to project himself
imaginatively into another situation. By this account, children understand
not by having a theory of other people’s minds but by simulating
imaginatively what must be going on in somebody’s else’s mind. A child
might think that her mother is sad by intuitively imagining how she
might feel under the circumstances and given certain facial cues. That