Sally-Anne test

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I've come to this conclusion myself. Due to my own experiences, I still believe this.

I've realized autistic people do have TOMs but ours just work different than NTs do. When doctors say we don't have it, don't take it literal. What they are really saying is "Your TOM doesn't work the same way as ours do." They call that an impairment because it's different.

When someone on the spectrum claims they don't have a TOM, don't assume they are bullshitting just because you have seen them use it before on here. They mean they don't have NT theory of mind meaning their TOM doesn't work the same way as NTs. Their TOM works differently.

never took the sally anne test, but i would've fail as a child. i still have a very hard time knowing what other people know and what they don't. no, not a very hard time, a terrible time. i've no idea. i say something and don't know if i should explain more or not, if people got my meaning or not. if they understood from my actions something or not. if they understood the circumstances or not, if they paid attention to what just happened in front of their eyes or not. and people get mad and say, all right, stop it already, i got the message.
you understand what i just wrote, i hope.

My diagnosis was basically a young guy asking me why a girl would lie to her mum about liking a birthday present. I said "That's beside the point. Why is the family so dysfunctional that the mother doesn't know what presents her daughter would like?" Was about 14 years ago, I hope they've become more sophisticated.

Many people on the spectrum do have ToM (the study I read up on which can be found in the book "Asperger Syndrome" showed that it was only impaired in people with classic autism, and that those with Aspergers were in the same range as NTs). There are some people with autism who really do lack ToM or whose ToM is greatly impaired.

I don't think it's that simple. By the strict definitions of "theory of mind" doesn't it seem that NTs lack a "theory of mind" or at least have an impaired theory of mind about autistic people? I mean, reading the research:

* One of my favorite examples - a daydream study. In this study, NTs and autistics were studied while switching from doing something to being idle. When NTs went idle, different parts of their brains lit up, while autistics' brains didn't switch like that. The conclusion? "Autistics don't daydream."

And yet, no one actually asked any of the autistic people "Do you daydream?" That's not in the study at all. However, isn't it also known that autistic people can have trouble switching from one task to another due to inertia?

And it's not just in relation to autistic people: It seems that people in general seem to have a lot of trouble modeling or understanding experiences different from theirs, or perceived as different.

I don't really know what I'm working toward here, but I think what's being described is...perhaps... not quite what it is described as. I do think there is something there, though. Like I have so much trouble modeling what other people might be thinking, or creating a story from a picture or video, that does point to a difference in cognition from NTs,

I am interested in all those types of studies, but I still don't really get the science behind.

I do know that *I* lack ToM though (or that is definitely severely impaired).

I guess if he knows she would have definitely used them at the post office, that would have ruled out the fitness class because she would have noticed them missing if she lost them earlier, but doesn't rule out the florist.

These "theory of mind" tests seem to me to be more about jumping to conclusions on the basis of insufficient information and then assuming you are right.

Right, there's something going on. I don't know that the description people like Simon Baron-Cohen provide is necessarily the accurate description. But I'm not sure how else to explain it.

I am trying not to fall into something I've seen some do, which is try to deny there's any impairment going on, that it's just different, especially when they might be telling the truth...about a subset of autistic people. But not all autistic people, and so what does it mean for those who do have these impairments when arguing they don't really exist?

I just think that... there's definitely something here, but it's poorly defined in some ways and how it works for most people is rarely examined in any kind of depth.

What's actually going on is definitely not what is being reported. It's annoying when most people studying it are failing to take the simple step of separating their own view, usually nonautistic, from some imagined objectively correct view. That's bad science, as well as a really naive way of seeing the world.