The functioning of the theory of mind in blind children
Abstract
This study explored the development of a theory of mind in blind children aged between 7 and 14 years. Four tasks were administered. Two of them assessed the understanding of false beliefs: deceptive container test and changed location test; the other two assessed the perspective-taking ability with regard to well-known and unknown objects. Older blind children performed better than younger students in false belief tasks and in the perspective-taking task with regard to well-known objects. Moreover, blind children had less difficulty with understanding other people’s beliefs than with understanding their perspective, but only when understanding the perspective concerned an unknown abstract object.
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