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emotion is then projected onto her mother. Understanding other’s hopes,
desires, and motivations might work in a similar way.
Beginning in the 1980s, experiments were devised to test this
theory of mind (TOM) ability in children with autism and ASD. In the
classic experiment, a child with autism is presented with the following
scenario either with two dolls or two people: Sally puts a marble into a
basket she is carrying and puts it down to go out of the room. Ann takes
the marble and places it into a box that she has. When Sally comes back
into the room, the child is asked where she will look for the marble: in
the basket or the box. A child with good TOM skills will say that Sally
will look in the basket because she does not know that Ann has taken
the marble and placed it in the box. The child with autism, on the other
hand, will state that Sally will look in the box, because he or she will
not understand that Sally still thinks the marble is in the basket where
she left it. The child with autism cannot read Sally’s mind. It soon became
apparent that most children with ASD did in fact have a severe
deficit in this area, regardless of the tests used to measure TOM. What
was so interesting was that the difficulties in understanding were specific
to social situations; they did not apply to inferring simple visual
perspectives that were not observable to the viewer. Children with autism
could describe what lay behind a mountain or on the other side of
a cube. They could describe what somebody else saw but not what the
person felt or believed. This difficulty in perspective was also more than
an understanding of emotions; it extended to motivations and desires
and to all the internal mental states of other people. Both children and
adults with ASD seemed unable to make a spontaneous, intuitive inference
about the mind of another person and to have a limited ability to
understand their own psychological makeup.
But it also became apparent that children with other types of developmental
problems, like Down syndrome, had difficulties with TOM
too, though usually their problems were much milder. There was also
some concern that the tests used to measure TOM in fact captured a
more primary problem in understanding the words we use to describe
these concepts, not the concepts themselves. It may be that the children
had trouble understanding the story or the meaning of what happened,
not necessarily the mind of the dolls. After all, we have known for a
long time that children with autism have considerable difficulties in
comprehension and expression of language. But more recent work by
Baron-Cohen has shown that even if the test is based on photographs of