Is autism characterised by a broken ability to think about thoughts?

What is it about?

In the dark ages of autism research we used to think autism was the result of either brain damage or 'refrigerator mothers'. Brilliant work by Uta Frith, Alan Leslie and colleagues made the incredibly smart suggestion that we can understand autism as the result of a decreased ability to represent thoughts. This theory was very successful in explaining some features of autistic cognition. Over the decades various people have presented challenges to the theory, and so it has evolved in several ways. This paper charts the development of the original theory, and assesses the degree to which it can explain the huge amount of research that has been performed subsequent to the development of the theory. We outline a couple of issues still to be addressed, relating to the lack of a psychological theory of how we work out what others are thinking and how we assess the ability of people to do this. We suggest ways to solve this problem, and note that they lead to the conclusion that autistic failure to understand non-autistic minds is due to the same issues as failures by non-autistic individuals to understand autistic minds.

Featured Image

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The Theory of Mind hypothesis of autism has been the most successful, and longest-serving, theory attempting to explain autism. The original theory was brilliant, but subsequent revisions have made the theory less and less useful. Here we celebrate the success of the original theory, but also lay out a new approach to conceptualising and testing theory of mind. We hope this removes some of the damaging stereotypes of autism, not out of a desire for political correctness, but simply because they are incorrect.

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