ABSTRACT
In 1985 a group of British researchers published a seminal paper titled Does the autistic child have a theory of mind? (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985), igniting a new era of research on autism. Baron-Cohen and his colleagues found that the majority of children with autism failed a classic theory-of-mind test, in contrast to normally developing preschoolers and children with Down syndrome. Follow-up studies provided further support for their hypothesis that children with autism do not have a theory of mind: They fail to understand stories that involve deception and do not use mental-state terms such as think and know in their retelling of these kinds of stories (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1986). The significance of the theory of mind hypothesis of autism, as it came to be known in the literature (Baron-Cohen, Tager-Flusberg, & Cohen, 1993), was that it not only explained the failure of children with autism on tasks tapping theory-of-mind abilities, but also provided a unified explanation for the primary diagnostic impairments in pretend play, social functioning, and communication (Baron-Cohen, 1988; Frith, 1989; Leslie, 1987). Yet over the past decade much of the excitement originally generated by work on theory of mind in autism has been dispelled. Several researchers are now skeptical about its significance as a theory that explains the primary symptoms that define this complex neurodevelopmental disorder. In this chapter I review this history, critically examining the issues that led to the current status of the theory of mind hypothesis of autism.
