Surely on some occasion we have been able to see how our little one when seeing another child crying next to a punctured balloon tells us something similar to: "the baby is sad because the balloon has been broken ...". Something that is so simple and obvious to us is, in fact, a much more complex and elaborate process than it seems.
We, in an innate way, can interpret certain situations and attribute the intentions, desires or emotions of someone. Or we can even assume what that person knows or thinks, being able to discover that it does not correspond to the same as us.
TO knowing what others know is called Theory of Mind, and today we are going to know a little more about what is this process that is so elaborate and that, in certain situations, it can be altered.
Theory of the Mind: what it is
When our son understands that someone is sad in a certain situation and knows the reason, or when he knows that the person who drives does not see the same as him from his seat, he is using aspects that would be included in the so-called "Theory of Mind "
In a technical way, we can say that the Theory of the Mind is the ability to perceive that other people have an internal state just like ours but, at the same time, different from it. A classic example to better understand the Theory of Mind (and at the same time, evaluate each child's ability) is the Sally and Anne's story.
In this story we are in the room of little Sally, who has a basket, and little Anne, who has a box. Sally keeps a small ball in her basket and then leaves the room but Anne, who is very naughty, takes it off and puts it inside her box.
Given this situation, the question we ask ourselves is: "Where will Sally go to get her ball: in the basket or in the box?". It is a more difficult question than it seems at first, since a certain level of abstraction is necessary for the little ones to recognize that Sally, who has left the room, does not know that the object moves (and therefore, will seek the little ball in your basket).
most of children between four and five years answered incorrectly. They answered that Sally would look in the box, because they had trouble understanding Sally's logical thinking; that is to say, they answered that he would look in the box because, as they knew it, Sally must also know).
Theory of the Mind it develops between three and seven years old, and two stages can be differentiated: between three and four years the tasks of false belief (the story of Sally and Anne) can be understood, while between six and seven years it is already possible to understand the mental representations of others people (for example: "my brother thinks that mom thinks he has not done the homework).
As they grow and develop their different skills, children learn to follow the gaze of another, participate in "as if ..." games, to understand that another person may think differently than their own, to understand jokes and the irony.
ASD, Asperger's Syndrome and Mind Theory
It may happen that there are problems when it comes to realizing what others think or what a person thinks, such as children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) or Asperger's Syndrome.
For the German psychologist Uta Frith, children with ASD show serious difficulties in differentiating what is in their mind and what is in others'. When someone cannot put themselves in the place of another person, what they can do is unpredictable, meaningless and difficult to understand (for example, the death of a loved one could not be associated with the feeling of sadness).
This difficulty in the Theory of Mind can help to better understand the difficulties of people with ASD or Asperger Syndrome in the social area, with some of the consequences of this deficit being the difficulty in predicting what someone will do, the difficulty to realize the intentions of others, the difficulty in understanding the emotions of others or, when offering any type of information, not taking into account the level of knowledge of the person with whom you are talking (for example, talking with parents of what has been done at school as if they were also present).
The Theory of Mind, or knowing what others know, is something that must be taken into account in the development of our children, since the human being, being social by nature, needs to have certain resources to understand different situations that can arise throughout a lifetime.
