That was kind of me too. I have lots of Asperger’s-types, ADD, and OCD in my family.
I think of it in terms like this: some people really excel at social skills-- they’re “A” students at it. The people who need from-the-ground-up help building those skills with a class-type structure, or tutoring model, they’re the ones for whom it’s their worst subject-- their “F” subject without help.
For me, it’s my “C” subject.
That’s what I mean too.
Sort of. But it’s more like: If you’ve met one person, you’ve met one mammal. The range of things called ‘autism’ is wider than the range of people you meet at school or at work.
Yeah, it was a “C” subject for me too. And I know some people for whom it’s an “A” subject- my usual thought is that they really should have gone into politics, sales or even coaching (the person I’m thinking of is actually an architect), because they’d be able to leverage that natural ability even more.
Just want to make it clear I’m asking @Velocity if it’s possible the Time article said it was about a developmental test.
It seems odd to assume a verbal autistic adult would have trouboe getting the right answer. The logic needed is no more complicated than the logic of language itself, or of other behaviors a high functioning autistic person can handle. But it taking an autistic child longer to learn it would make sense.
I just couldn’t imagine any of the autistic adults I’ve known giving the wrong answer.
I can’t recall if the Newsweek article was specifically about autistic children or autistic people in general. May have been about kids, but my memory isn’t that clear about it.
Oh. I expected you had the original, since you appeared to be quoting it
There’s a sort of Catch-22. Anyone with enough language the understand and process the question, then give a coherent answer can probably also think through the situation logically, as well as be experienced enough to question their initial assumption, just because you asked.
Someone not so savvy, probably has less language, is more likely to make the error of assumption, but also, less likely to be able to communicated that to you.
That’s exactly the meaning I was trying to convey.
Interesting article here about how language skills affect the ability to pass this sort of test:
I’m reminded of how author Eric Chen rewrote a passage from Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” to better match his experience of growing up with ASD.
Original:
And one day, Julie sat down at a desk next to me and put a tube of Smarties on the desk, and she said, “Christopher, what do you think is in here?”
And I said, “Smarties”.
Then she took the top off the Smarties tube and turned it upside down and a little pencil came out and she laughed and I said, “It’s not Smarties, it’s a pencil”.
Then she put the little red pencil back inside the Smarties tube and put the top back on.
Then she said, “If your Mommy came in now, and we asked her what was inside the Smarties tube, what do you think she would say?”, because I used to call Mother Mummy then, not Mother.
And I said, “A pencil”.
That was because when I was little I didn’t understand about other people having minds. And Julie said to Mother and Father that I would always find this very difficult. But I don’t find this difficult now. Because I decided that it was a kind of puzzle, and if something is a puzzle there is always a way of solving it.
Chen’s revision:
I was put in a cold room smelling of strangeness-A (translated: antiseptic). The lady with big black glasses asked me many questions. I just answered as much as I can.
For example, she showed me a Smarties (tube) and asked me what it is. I said, “Smarties”. Then she took out a pencil from the Smarties (tube) and made some odd sounds and movement (translated: slight laughing and smiling).
I remained still, not knowing what to do or say, except that the light glaring off her glasses is disturbing me, so I flicked my eyes around her spectacle frame. She asked me what I saw. Glancing at her hand, I replied “a pencil”. Then she put the pencil back into the Smarties tube.
She asked me, “If your Mommy came in now, and we asked her what was inside the Smarties tube, what do you think she would say?”
I took a while to understand what she said. It was a long sentence and I must grind through it carefully. She repeated the question again, and again. After a while, I concluded that it meant: “What is inside the tube?” So I answered her: “A pencil.”
And no one ever knew what was really happening.
Thank you, that was excellent. And I hope people note the end of Chen’s rewrite. He has the right answer, it was just the wrong question.
This article on Theory of Mind lists 5 stages of Theory of mind.
The test with the marbles/smarties is a test of the 4th stage, “false belief”.
The article mentions that the named test was done with neurotypical children, Downs Syndrome children, and autistic children, and that (at whatever age it was they were tested) 85% of the children in the first two groups got it correct (understanding that the person just entering would have a false belief), only 20% of the autistic kids did.
So the article was mostly correct, although it really applies to children at a specific developmental stage, probably indicating that autistic kids take longer to reach that level, not that they don’t ever reach it.
I just asked my 7 year old daughter, who has been diagnosed as having autism, and she correctly answered the red box because, “Mary didn’t know they were moved.”
She is extremely verbal, very social, and very high functioning, but has a variety of issues which experts diagnosed as autism.
Whether we “are all on the spectrum” is a legitimate question that psychologists study. Does autism behave as a continuous distribution, with everybody falling somewhere on the curve? And then there is a threshold past which we call it autism?
Or, is it a qualitatively different thing. Some people are autistic and others are not. People with autism can still be on a distribution of severity, but people without it are not on that distribution at all. People without it may still show some autism traits, but they’re really not on the autism distribution.
I don’t know enough about autism to know what the research currently suggests.
I really think Q.Q.Switcheroo has the right answer.
There is a deep fallacy in so much of they way these experiments are portrayed. They claim to know the underlying processes at work, and the reason for what occurs. There are all manner of competing theories of mind, and people who wish to shoe horn their own pet theory into yet another theory of behaviour or development. Asserting the OP’s they can’t see things from Mary’s perspective as the reason is about as scientific as claiming that Clever Hans could count.
We see this all the time in lay explanations right across the spectrum of human and animal behaviour. It isn’t science, it seems more to be a human failing.
Which is of course a itself a non-scientific claim about human behaviour. 
Take a look what happens when you give kids an incentive to get the right answer:
Only 3 out of 23 autistic children gave the correct answer on the Sally Ann test, but 17 got it right when knowledge of someone else’s beliefs allowed them to win a prize.
I am curious about something, though. It sounds like the new experiment was done with actors rather than dolls, and it strikes me that younger or autistic kids simply may not consider dolls to have minds and therefore don’t reason the answer correctly. I wonder if the original Sally Ann experiment has been done with actors and if so whether it made any difference to the results?
Seems likely that it has at some point, but I can’t find anything.
Interesting.
It still suffers from the problem that there is an implicit assumption, that the children are answering the same question in each test. The modified test is guiding the children to the question, not necessarily guiding them to the answer.
Seems the experimenters are trying to work out how to get the children to answer 42. They are less concerned about what the question was.
Bear with me for a moment, because it might seem like I’m going off topic, but I promise to make it relevant.
There’s a famous question, at least famous (or notorious) among people who deal with disability, mental illness, and D&Es. It’s this: when people with schizophrenia are asked “Does all food taste the same?” they nearly invariably answer “Yes.”
No one knows why.
And, inasmuch as this is used as a diagnostic question, it doesn’t matter. It’s a very useful question for rooting out malingerers. Malingerers almost always say that they hear voices, because this is a famous symptom of schizophrenia, but real schizophrenics lie, because experience has taught them that it gets a bad reaction from other people. On the other hand, schizophrenics say that all food tastes the same, and since this is not a well-known phenomenon, malingerers don’t answer yes to this question.
So if you can find a statistically significant difference in how autistic and non-autistic children answer the Sally-Anne question, is can be useful in diagnosis-- especially, it can be useful if autistic children tend to change their answer for a reward, and non-autistic children do not. (Albeit, I personally suspect that it’s useful only up to a certain age.)
The reason why does not matter. All that matters it that it is reliable.
If that is what it was originally used for, then it is legitimate.
However, using it, and no, or little other information to draw conclusions about the workings of an autistic child’s mind, seems to me, laughable.
“D&Es” means what?
This is fascinating, but a spot of Googling isn’t turning up any corroboration. Do you have a link where I can read more about this?