{"id":8422,"date":"2019-05-22T16:07:32","date_gmt":"2019-05-22T16:07:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/mind-blindness_theory\/"},"modified":"2019-05-22T16:07:32","modified_gmt":"2019-05-22T16:07:32","slug":"mind-blindness_theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/mind-blindness_theory\/","title":{"rendered":"Mind-blindness theory"},"content":{"rendered":"

A theory claiming that in people with autism and Asperger’s syndrome, there are degrees of mind blindness, or difficulties in imagining and being aware of other people’s emotional and mental states.  Allied to such difficulties is that mind blindness is associated with being incapable of attributing beliefs and desires to others.  This is often the result of a specific developmental delay in acquiring a theory of mind.  Such deficits in social insight have also been reported in other disorders such as schizophrenia as well as presenting during the ageing process in some individuals. The association of autism with mind blindness was first proposed in a landmark paper<\/a> by Baron-Cohen et al. (1985) in which they put forward a model of metarepresentational development as a means of accounting for social impairment in childhood autism.  Subsequently, Simon Baron-Cohen<\/a>‘s book<\/a> Mindblindness:an essay on autism and theory of mind<\/span> (1995) laid the foundations for developing the theory further.  The cortical pathways or networks implicated in mind blindness through the aegis of brain-imaging studies have been addressed in a paper<\/a> by Uta Frith<\/a> in 2001.  In particular, they involve connections between regions of the prefrontal cortex and the superior temporal sulcus.             <\/p>\n

See Asperger’s syndrome<\/a>, Autism<\/a>, Medial (pre-) frontal cortex<\/a>, Mind reading<\/a>, Other minds problem<\/a>, Prefrontal cortex (PFC)<\/a>, Superior temporal sulcus and gyrus<\/a>, Theory of child’s mind (ToM)<\/p>\n

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A theory claiming that in people with autism and Asperger’s syndrome, there are degrees of mind blindness, or difficulties in imagining and being aware of other people’s emotional and mental states.  Allied to such difficulties is that mind blindness is associated with being incapable of attributing beliefs and desires to others.  This is often the … <\/p>\n

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