Hide and Seek (and Mindblindness)

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I have recently read a book "Mindblindness. An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind" by Simon Baron-Cohen. The author argues that mindblindness (lack of theory of mind) is a central feature of autism. There are several tests of mindblindness, such as a "marble test" featuring Sally and Anne. However, these trivial tests seem to be designed for children, as adults - even mindblind - can easily solve them by using logic. As many members of this board were not diagnosed as children (or remain undiagnosed), it is now too late to speculate whether they would pass or fail mindblindness tests. However, I believe that there is one "test" that every child administered on him/herself many times, and which can give a meaningful result (to some extent, at least). That's the game of hide-and-seek.

It is a popular game, often played by children younger than 18 months. However, it is a game of deception, which requires acknowledgment that other people may have different beliefs. Therefore many autistic children avoid it. Before we jump to conclusions, I need to point two things. First, playing the seeker does not require the theory of mind, hiding does. Second, according to Baron-Cohen normal children acquire part of theory of mind functionality at age 9 months, and the other part when they are around 4 years old. Mindblindness comes in two varietes, euqivalent to these two ages. It seems to me that only the "partial" (i.e. 9 month level) theory of mind is required to play hide-and-seek, and therefore the game may be enjoyable to some autistics. One can determine the level of mindblindness by observing if child points objects of interest to others.

I suspect myself of being mindblind, but I do not know on which level. I have played hide-and-seek several times, but not very frequently. I do not remember it as my favorite game. I enjoyed seeking much more than hiding, and in fact I vaguely remember revealing myself once from my hiding place, as the idea of hiding seemed inappropriate (however, I am not sure that this is a correct memory). I do not know at what age I started to engage in the game. What about you?

Last edited by magic on 30 Sep 2004, 6:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I remember playing hide-and-seek when I was younger, but not very often. I did not like hiding and would, most of the time, be the seeker.
I do not really know whether I am mindblind or not.

Loy

I can remember playing hide and seek, but how many times I did it I can't remember. One time I remember, I want to say 1985, we were at a party for something, I don't remember what for, but the people had a nice house, with a gas stove I might add, and they had a tent set up in the backyard (probably a graduation). Myself and a few others played hide and go seek, but I wasn't too good at hiding, I hide right inside the door of a utiltiy shed with a light on inside, in plain sight of everyone else. However I do remember the tent they had set up. I remember standing outside the tent, shaking the hell out of one of the ropes that anchored the tent down, resulting in someone coming out to investigate and yelling at me. Back then if I didn't like it, I didn't didn't do it, so I must of had fun.

Did I initiate it at all? No.
Did I like it? It depended, see below

Another time I remember playing hide and seek was july 1989, it was at our house w/ two other kids who lived near me. That particular afternoon, everything we did was imaginitive, and I didn't like their imaginitive play ideas at all. But I played along to be nice. Hide and seek was one of those things we did that afternoon, and we were hiding and seeking in my house, much to the displeasure of my mom. When I went to hide, I went in the basement, and hide inside an empty cabniet we had in the basement, where I could get away from the other people for five minutes or so.

Whilst I have great respect for the Prof, I think this "theory of mind" is a red herring. I can't remember a time when I didn't understand perfectly that others had their own viewpoints and desires. I haven't read this particular book (no funds) so I may have misunderstood, but I suspect what's happened is that the researchers have simply misinterpreted our lack of demonstrated interest in what others think.

They expect children to read visual signals to assess others' feelings and intent, but Asplings are unaware of such clues, and so don't look for them (expecting that if anyone wants us to know something, then they will tell us about it). Not looking for non-verbal clues in no way implies that we are not aware that others have independant minds, in fact the conclusion seems to me absurd!

I rather liked the game as I recall. It gave me an opportunity to use my surroundings creatively, and it was the hiding that I enjoyed most. We also played another game in which we would hide something and someone else would search for it while we said they were "hot" or "cold" This seems very much like the classic marble test. I also enjoyed performing magic tricks for a while when I was younger. All of these activities suggest to me a sound "theory of mind."
I agree with gwynfryn, it seems I have always had a strong "theory of mind", though I was never interested too much by the minds of others. And on another note which I am sure I have heard someone say elsewhere, it seems almost the opposite to me. I have always felt that the minds of others must be so unlike mine that to try and make guesses would only be asking for trouble. This I believe, is where the nonverbal cues come in. There are times when I can guess what someone must be thinking, though I would rarely act on such a guess. I think that most NTs are much more confident in there guesses, due to some extra information that they are privy to.
The underlying feeling for me is that people are very much isolated in their own minds with their own experiences. NTs seem to feel that this is not true or at least not worth thinking about.

Hmmm. I loved hide and seek. Once I realized that other people could see parts of my body even when I could not see them (i.e. I thought that if my eyes were concealed, they could not see me), I became very good at it. Being small, I could fit myself into very small (dark) spaces and enjoyed doing so. Often the other children would forget about me and go away, because they couldn't find me. It would take me half an hour or more to realize that they were gone....In fact, this very same thing happened to me a month ago. When I play hide and seek, I really do not want to be found!

Interesting topic, Magic.

I enjoyed hiding quite a bit. I like being resourceful and finding places to hide where no one would find me made me feel quite clever. I also enjoy squeezing myself into small places (though I can get claustrophobic if I feel I can't get out of them), so sometimes I would stay hidden for quite a lot longer than I should have (ie. where as most children would give up hiding after half hour or so of not being found, I would just stay there until I was told I had to come out by my parents). I didn't want to come out and have someone say they found me, either.

I think my favorite thing was that my father was very good at finding hiding places, he would help me and my brother play by putting us in places we couldn't get into ourselves, like the hamper, or on a top shelf in the closet.

I also liked being the seeker, because that also made me feel quite clever, when I could find someone fairly quickly. My brothers had such a hard time keeping quiet that it was usually not too hard to find them. I was a champion seeker.

It is pretty much the same for me. I don't recall ever being unaware of the fact that others have their own thoughts and feelings, I just have a very difficult time discerning what those thoughts or feelings may be. I formulate hypothesis through logic, rather than intuition, which it seems NTs are able to do. Even when I am fairly sure of what's going on in their heads, I still don't know how to respond, and I think a lot of aspies probably have the same problem. What is percieved to be lack of awareness may just be the inability to reciprocate, or just general confusion or uncertainty.



You have a good point here. However, I wouldn't go so far as to say mindblindness is complete fabrication. I know there are instances in which I have assumed that others are thinking the same thing as me, even when, intellectually, I'm able to determine that that is probably not so. I also sometimes forget to give an adequate amount of information to someone when I am speaking to them, because I assume that they already have that knowledge, like I do. This is not a concious assumption I make, but rather is just the way I speak, and something I have to remind myself to be aware of and improve on.

Thanks for your replies, they show how different people are. I do not agree with Gwynfryn that the "theory of mind" is a red herring. I actually very well remember the time when I considered other people as objects, moving and talking, but devoid of thoughts and feelings. Sometime in my twenties I started looking at people and thinking "Can they possibly have consciousness, same as I do?" This thought seemed preposterous and unworldly. But I finally convinced myself, and now I assume that other people have independents minds and thoughts. This assumption is on the conscious level and disagrees with my intuition. I still catch myself on expecting that others must think the same and agree with me in all matters, or telling stories "from the middle", as if others shared my knowledge. I believe that intuitive mindblindness is a reason for my constant misunderstandings and apparent, though unintentional, rudeness.

I have learned of Asperger's Syndrome while researching mindblindness. I have read about the "theory of mind" and realized that it closely resembled a failed project of mine. The project has failed for the reason given by ware4, that is difference in the way of thinking. However, I became aware of this difference only after analysing the causes of that failure.

Contrary to Gwynfryn's experience, I can intuitively read and display body language, although numerous incidents imply that I am not as good at it as I would like to believe. Imagine being aware of verbal and non-verbal clues and their meaning, but understanding them only on the "imperative level", i.e. failing to realize that they result from mental states of others. It can be likened to watching a movie. Actors laugh, cry and get angry, but there is a script behind these expressions, not feelings. Movie characters do not have independent minds, and they actually do not exist when not on the scene.

I expect that now Gwynfryn will say that I cannot possibly be an aspie, because my major problem is different than his (lack of understanding of body language). He might be right, of course. Or maybe Simon Baron-Cohen is right. He says that mindblindness comes in various degrees, and that is certainly what I can see. Note that being able to mind-read does not imply telepathy. It is merely an ability to make an intuitive guess about others' thought processes. What is remarkable is good accuracy of these guesses. Lacking this ability is the simplest explanation of my numerous pitfalls. I can be "rude" not only in direct contact, but also in writing, where non-verbal clues are naturally absent.

Oh- I do see people more or less as moving objects most of the time, unless they are somone I know, or I really focus on them. Mostoly they are just something to avoid unless I have to deal with one. But, I still like hide and seek!

Hmm, we could do with an NT input here! Admittedly, when I watch people out of the window say, I'm not consciusly aware of their "thoughts" or even if they have any, but that's not what I meant; the "mindblindness" thing from what I've seen seems to suggest we're not aware that others are independent thinkers with their own agenda, which to me seems absurd.

In similar vein, I'm not aware of electrons wizzing to and fro in wires, but I had no difficulty accepting it happens, when first informed of the theory, and strongly suspect I always knew something was happening when the light was switched on (though I can't remember for sure) so we need to be careful with semantics here!

Do most people, when they view others, also get an automatic overplay of emotions and motivations which are part and parcel of the totality? That I could understand, but it remains just a case of awareness of body language; it is no more akin to "reading minds" than reading a translated text is to reading the original, so "mindblindness" to me still seems a silly and misleading phrase.

I wonder if it's akin to those programs for the deaf, where a well practised sign reader can watch the main image whilst still getting a sense of the translation "automatically", though they are barely paying conscious attention to the translator in the bottom corner?

Whatever the case, given the cultural variability of body language, it's bound to be a less detailed interchange of information than listening directly to the original statement (unless the subject is lying of course, but as we've seen on the psychopath debate on AI, it's possible to deliberately mislead with body language too, without even going into the common errrors people make in this respect).

Over to you magic; anything in the book to clarify the issue?

don't know about clarity, but resonate completely with magic's experiences - there seems to be something in the "intuition" magic talks about, as i'm very good at working out what people are thinking, their body language, etc. (mind you, have training in counselling and some psychotherapeutic techniques, and have studied behavioural psychology).

"mindblindness" may be as much as misnomer as "wordblindeness" for dyslexia, but i suppose it's just a commonly used idiom which people use and apply, and which has a commony accepted meaning (and which makes me grind my purist teeth - inaccuracy makes me wince). signs, signifiers and symbols only mean what we say they mean, after all.

V.

I do quite often view others as obstacles or just interesting bits of the landscape. And actually it seems my experience was the opposite of Magic's.
As long as I can remember, I always assumed that people had minds of their own. Then in my teens or twenties I began to question this, as I was questioning all of my assumptions. I do accept the possibility, but still feel that there are only certain things that I can know for sure(ala Descartes). Most of those are contained within my own mind. It's this whole problem of uncertainty. When I fail to respond to somone emotionally, it is because I cannot choose THE correct response. I'm not sure that there is only one, and this is apparently where I differ from NTs. I dont think it is necessary for them to chose in the way that I do.

This is the way subtitles and captioning gets for me after a while.
I won't even think about them until they say something like (breathing wheezily)

This made me think of colorblindness. The term has always sort of bothered me. As I understand it, they still see colors, their spectrum just doesnt seem to have as much variation. Maybe this is similar to the way mindblindness works.

That is exactly what I was not aware for the bigger part of my life, and I still have problems with it on a intuitive level. According to Baron-Cohen, mindblindness can be partially overcome by means of conscious logical thinking, but such a workaround does not make a person a normal mindreader. In my case conscious thinking requires much more effort than intuition, and is much slower, and therefore prone to allow faulty intuition to surface. During conversations I am unable to apply conscious logic to all discussed content, and thus I defer to mindblind intuition, often with bad results.

What I was unaware until recently is that majority of people posess an intuitive understanding of independence of other minds, as well as an intuitive ability to "read" them. It is possible that you belong to that majority. According to Baron-Cohen, some autistics develop mindreading ability, often years later than it is normally done, though usually still have abnormalities of more subtle kind. Others develop "theory of mind" in an incomplete form.

Baron-Cohen does not discuss at length the connection between mindblindness and recognition of body language. In fact the only aspect of body language that in his theory has direct effect on the mindreading ability is the "Eye Direction Detector" (EDD), the mechanism that detects the presence of eyes and computes the direction of gaze. EDD is supposed to be intact in autistic individuals, but only in its basic functions. It performs more complex functions in tandem with the "Shared Attention Mechanism" (SAM), whose role is not suficiently clear to me to describe it here. SAM is said to be responsible for the pointing gesture (that toddlers develop), and is supposed to be malfunctioning in most autistic individuals, but not all. In addition EDD is responsible for the physiological arousal during eye contact, that so many of us have problems with.

According to Baron-Cohen, mindblindness causes autistics to have difficulty recognizing facial expressions of belief-based emotions (such as surprise), while recognition of simple emotions (e.g. happy, sad) is not impaired. Baron-Cohen speculates that mindblindness is caused by the damage to three areas of the brain: amygdala, superior temporal sulcus (STS) and orbito-frontal cortex (OFC). (I am repeating information from the book and I do not feel competent to discuss it.) Damage to the STS is said to cause deficits in EDD and face-processing tasks. This would imply that mindblindness, eye-contact issues and facial expression recognition problems are "co-morbid", but to some extent independent (not influencing one another).


Baron-Cohen argues (or, rather, states as an obvious fact) that the answer to the above question is yes. This is not obvious for me, and contrary to my perception. However, as I explained above, the ability to perceive such a view is not equivalent to awareness of body language. There is no doubt that proper recognition of body language is of great help to mindreading, but it is not in fact necessary. According to Baron-Cohen people with congenital blindness have "theory of mind" unimpaired and are apparently able to participate normally in social relationships, in contrast to myself.

It is difficult to summarize 171-page book in one post, so please let me know if you want clarification of any details. I eagerly await your response.

Talk about coincidence- I've just finished studying the Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith study (that being the Sally Anne marble test) and it was certainly interesting. Our teacher did say that as with any autistic traits, there are varying levels of Theory of Mind and what is true for one autistic child is not true for another. Indeed in the test 20% of the autistic children got the answer right- that is 4 out of 20. And in the other two groups (Down's Syndrome and 'Normal') some children got the answer wrong. So lack of 'Theory of Mind' is certainly not something that can be applied to all on the autistic spectrum or can not be applied to some 'normal' children.

I have other fairly detailed notes on this particular study that might be easier to summarise than stuff in the book (not being insulting or anything. I just know what those books are like) if anyone is interested. Things like good things about the study and negatives. The ages of the children etc

That is most likely true. Simon Baron-Cohen writes that 20 to 35% of children with autism pass Sally-Anne test (4 year mental age level). However when more taxing test was administered - about nested beliefs, such as "Anne thinks that Sally thinks that..." (7 year level) - even those who passed the simple test failed the more complex one. Baron-Cohen notes that "a very small minority of individuals with autism pass tests even at the 7 year level", an example being Temple Grandin. I suppose that these statistics were done on Kanner-type autistic children, and that aspies would fare better, but this is not stated in the book.

For me, trivial Sally-Anne test poses no problem. To solve the test at the 7-year level, I had to use logic and prove an intermediate statement (that all observers present from beginning to end must think the same about Sally, and this includes me and Anne), before I was able to give the correct answer. I wonder if others can do it intuitively.


I am interested. Do you have these notes in an electronic form?

am very interested in ktmcs and magic's comments above, and wonder if anyone's read Frith and Happé's work? it's about how ToM can be learned/developed.

if you haven't and are interested, and if you've got access to academic journals, the reference is:

Uta Frith and Francesca Happé: "Theory of Mind and Self-Consciousness: What is it like to be Autistic?"
Mind and Language, Vol.14, No.1, March 1999, pp.1-22.

i have a PDF copy i can send (if someone tells me how!) to anyone else.

the more i research or hear about ASD, the more i find that DSM-IV and other diagnostic criteria is limited - guidelines, in some ways. i would never have suspected i had AS until i started reading the accounts of individual adults who had been diagnosed with AS, and the ways in which the dx criteria were manifested and presented in that person. the spectrum of ASD seems to me like the periodic table - here are all the elements, and there are millions of possibilities of combinations of these elements, qualitative as well as quantitative, to make different entities (entities in this case being people with AS!). if this analogy works, what are the chances of any two people with AS ever presenting with exactly the same characteristics? (mathematicians - a rhetorical question... )

magic and ktmcs - any references you care to send me would be gratefully received - you could PM them to me, unless others would like the same.

the amygdala/limbic brain linkage is also associated with "emotional" recognition, which is not a process of conscious thought, even though the response (rather than the reaction) may be mediated by the consciousness. i've read somewhere that AS may be a physical "disturbance" in that a linkage between the amygdala and limbic is severed or otherwise impaired, hence the lack of unconscious/automatic reactions to facial expressions, etc., although they can be learned, and this is where the "processing speed" is slower in people with AS. having read posts which describe this latter, it seems like a goodenough hypothesis. i know i've "learned" the rules of social behaviour (over 40-odd years), but have to remember them continuously (exhausting), and still miss the point and get it wrong, both regularly and frequently.

to me, reading fiction can give an insight into how people "work" emotionally and socially. i still feel a bit like an anthropologist studying an alien culture, but at least it's intriguing. i also use astrology to predict how another person might behave - knock it if you will, but it works for me! (and it's mathematical, which helps).

"mindblindness", then, is probably a catch-all phrase which is merely imprecise rather than erroneous, and a simplified phrase which allows non-psychologists to get some idea of the concept - a point of reference, if you like.

what about a "competition" on this site to come up with a more meaningful, and yet still simple, phrase? ......

V.