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The
British
Psychological
Society
British Journal of Developmental Psychology (2006), 24, 507–528
q 2006 The British Psychological Society
www.bpsjournals.co.uk
Production of basic emotions by children with
congenital blindness: Evidence for the
embodiment of theory of mind
Anne-Catherine Roch-Levecq*
Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, USA
Children with congenital blindness are delayed in understanding other people’s minds.
The present study examined whether this delay was related to a more primitive form of
inter-subjectivity by which infants draw correspondence between parental mirroring of
the infant’s display and proprioceptive sensations. Twenty children with congenital
blindness and 20 typically-developing sighted children aged between 4 and 12 years
were administered a series of tasks examining false belief and emotion understanding
and production. The blind children scored lower on the false belief tasks and did not
convey emotions facially to adult observers as accurately as sighted participants.
The adults’ ratings of the children’s expressions were correlated with the children’s
scores on the false belief tasks. It is suggested that understanding people’s minds might
be anchored in primitive embodied forms of relatedness.
The impact of congenital blindness on the acquisition of a theory of mind has been
investigated in a number of studies (Green, Pring, & Swettenham, 2004; McAlpine &
Moore, 1995; Minter, Hobson, & Bishop, 1998; Peterson, Peterson, & Webb, 2000).
These studies have used different variants of the false belief paradigm developed by
Wimmer and Perner (1983) and have shown that blind children have difficulties
understanding another person’s false belief.
The present study set out to explore the question of what sight contributes to social
interaction, and particularly, to the understanding of minds. The focus was the
relationship between understanding of false belief and inter-subjective experiences.
The instantaneous quality of the inputs provided by vision is not available to the blind
infant and consequently blindness disrupts the flow of inter-subjectivity and is a barrier
to its key features, i.e. synchrony, contingency and reciprocity. The aim of the present
study was to examine possible connections between the emergence of understanding of
other people’s minds, tested through false attribution tasks, and more developmentallyprimitive forms of relatedness to others, tested through the ability to express basic
* Correspondence should be addressed to Anne-Catherine Roch-Levecq, Department of Ophthalmology, School of
Medicine, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0946, USA
(e-mail: [email protected]).
DOI:10.1348/026151005X50663
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508 Anne-Catherine Roch-Levecq
emotions facially. The possibility of an association between mind understanding and
primitive forms of relatedness was initially raised by Hobson (1987, 1991, 1994) but has
not been investigated empirically.
Blind children often appear depressed due to a lack of facial expression (Fraiberg,
1977). They also have difficulty recognizing basic vocal emotions (Minter, Hobson, &
Pring, 1991). By the age of 4, blind children have a growing repertoire of social cognitive
abilities, language, and representational skills, which should enable them to understand
basic emotions shown by others. This should facilitate their perspective-taking skills.
Therefore, they might not have significant difficulties recognizing the contexts in which
basic emotions are evoked. However, correct and reliable mapping through voluntary
control of facial expressions might be more problematic for them, given the inability to
see the expressions of others (Fogel, 1997). In sighted children the feedback loop of
mutual recognition is mediated early in development by eye-to-eye contact. This
mechanism has been described by Gergely and Watson (1996) as crucial in the
formation of self-representations. The absence of eye-to-eye contact in blind children
raises the question of whether there could be a link between blind children’s
performance on false belief attributions tasks and their ability to express emotions
facially.
This study was an attempt to show the connection, if any, between what Hobson
(1991, 1994) called ‘affectively charged interpersonal relations’, and Stern (1985) called
‘vitality affects’ occurring early in life, and the more sophisticated form of relatedness to
others’ minds termed theory of mind. This approach was in response to the claim that
perception and actions of bodies lead to knowledge of minds, expressed by theorists
such as Meltzoff and Gopnik (1994) and Hobson (1991, 1994).
Children with congenital blindness provide the opportunity to test this idea since,
according to Hobson (1991), the foundations of interpersonal relations are ‘innately
determined by perceptual-affective sensibilities towards the bodily appearances and
behaviour of others’ (p. 33). Imitation is a prototypical manifestation of such
‘sensibilities’ (Field, Woodson, Greenberg, & Cohen, 1982; Meltzoff & Moore, 1977,
1989, 1994). For Hobson, the differentiation between self and other occurs through the
perception of affect that is, in its primitive form, the perception of bodies. Such an
association would point to the contribution of early visual experiences to the
development of cognitive abilities. Using connectionist terminology, we could say that
visual experiences, such as mutual recognition resulting from eye-to-eye contact, are
among the inputs that feed or recurrently update genetically species-specific
predispositions (e.g. preference for human face, speech, etc.) or algorithms (Elman,
Bates, Johnson, Karmiloff-Smith, Parisi, & Plunkett, 1996), the underlying mechanisms
of a gradual emergent modularization of social cognitive functioning. Karmiloff–Smith,
Klima, Bellugi, Grant, and Baron-Cohen (1995) argued, on the basis of patterns of
dissociations between subdomains of social understanding (i.e. face processing,
language, theory of mind) shown by individuals with autism, Williams syndrome, Down
syndrome, and hydrocephalus with associated myelomeningocele, that these
predispositions become gradually specialized but also interconnected under the
massive early experience of superimposed inputs (i.e. face, eye gaze, voice and human
speech). The case of sensory deprivation presented by congenitally deaf and blind
children who fail social understanding tasks but gradually catch up with their typicallydeveloping peers under adequate exposure (e.g. Peterson et al., 2000; Peterson & Siegal,
2000) is better explained by such a theoretical framework than by the pure nativist view
of modularity. The latter postulates that encapsulated ‘modules’ or special areas in
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Blindness, theory of mind and basic emotions
509
the brain specifically devoted to cognitive functions (see Chomsky, Language
Acquisition Device or LAD, 1986) are present at birth and grow with maturation, thus
supporting more and more sophisticated behaviours and generating developmental
changes (Fodor, 1983).
The standard false belief paradigm was used in conjunction with a narrative task
where a person’s false belief was put in the naturalistic context of deception. Consistent
with previous findings, it was expected that children with congenital blindness would
be delayed in understanding false belief, when compared with sighted children matched
for age, gender, ethnicity, and language, but that their understanding would improve
with age independently of their degree of visual impairment. Elsewhere it has been
argued that blind children aged less than 8 years of age fail false belief tasks because their
use of information-processing resources such as memory and attention is not as efficient
as that of sighted children (Roch-Levecq, 2001).
In addition to the false belief attribution tasks, a task was presented that consisted of
the identification and enactment through facial expressions of basic emotions. A variant
of an emotion identification and ascription task initially designed by Denham (1986) was
used to test whether children with congenital blindness could verbally identify primary
emotions such as fear, happiness, sadness and anger, as well as display them accurately
through facial expressions to naı̈ve observers. Whether blind children between 4 and 12
years could verbally identify basic emotions was assessed from vignettes describing
realistic, yet stereotyped, situations which normally evoke different emotions. The
children were asked to say how they would feel when faced with each situation.
However, they were also asked to ‘map’ these emotions by displaying them on their own
face. The research by Galati et al. (2001, 2003) on the expressiveness of emotions in
children with congenital blindness reported that if spontaneous expressions did not
distinguish blind from sighted children, voluntary expressions did.
The examination of the possible association between performance on false belief
attribution tasks and emotion identification and mapping tasks was also intended to
address the question of why blind children fail theory of mind tasks. Is it because, like
children with autism, they lack a ‘decoupling mechanism’ that enables representations
of representations, or is it because they lack crucial visual experiences from birth that
activate some modularization process, which in turn, enables sighted children to
explain and predict the behaviours of others? Although some blind children exhibit
some behaviours characteristic of autism, blindness is not generally accompanied by
autism (Hobson, Brown, Minter, Lee, 1997). Therefore, the hypothesis of a slower
modularization process might receive support. Empirically, this hypothesis could be
tested by an association between false belief understanding scores and adult observers’
ratings of emotion expressions. The present study focused on the relationship between
the ability to make false belief attributions and a primitive form of relatedness to others
that relies on the ability to see and to be seen which starts at birth in sighted children
and is conducive to the formation of self-representations (Gergely & Watson, 1996).
In sum, it was predicted first that the blind children would score significantly lower
than the sighted children on the theory of mind tasks; second, it was predicted that the
blind children would perform at the same level as the sighted children on the verbal
identification part of the emotion understanding task, yet would be significantly less
able to convey these emotions through facial expressions to naı̈ve adult observers on the
mapping component of the task; the third prediction was that all children’s
performance on the false belief attribution tasks would be associated with the adults’
ratings of their emotional expressions.
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510 Anne-Catherine Roch-Levecq
Method
Participants
There were two groups of children, 20 legally blind from birth and free of any other
disability, and 20 sighted typically-developing children.
The blind children were recruited from the Special Education Program for visually
impaired children across different school districts in San Diego County. The parents of
the blind children were referred by the teachers of the visually impaired by post. Three
children were referred by the director of the Children’s Eye Center at the University of
California, San Diego. One child was recruited through the National Association of
Parents of Visually Impaired and two other children through the Blind Children’s Center
in Los Angeles. The process of selection of the blind children relied on reports from
teachers for visually impaired who reported them as free of any other disability, of
normal verbal ability and often as academically advanced children. The aetiology of
blindness varied. Table 1 gives a synopsis of the blind children’s aetiology and Snellen
visual acuities in feet with their LogMAR equivalents (Holladay, 1997). The blind
children affected with retinopathy were the only premature children in this sample;
their average duration of gestation was 26 weeks. All the sighted children were full term.
Table 1. Blind children’s visual acuity in Snellen and LogMar equivalent and aetiology
Subjects
Visual acuity in Snellen
18-B
10-B
20-B
16-B
5-B
2-B
15-B
9-B
6-B
19-B
14-B
12-B
8-B
11-B
13-B
1-B
17-B
3-B
4-B
21-B
Totally blind
20/200
Totally blind
Totally blind
20/400
20/200
20/400
20/200
20/200
20/400
20/200
Totally blind
20/200
Totally blind
20/200
Totally blind
20/200
20/200
Totally blind
20/200
Visual acuity in LogMARa
2.3
1.0
2.3
2.3
1.3
1.0
1.3
1.0
1.0
1.3
1.0
2.3
1.0
2.3
1.0
2.3
1.0
1.0
2.3
1.0
Aetiology
Leber’s amaurosis
Achromatopsia
Leber’s amaurosis
Retinopathy of prematurity
Retinopathy of prematurity
Hypoplasia of optic nerve
Hypoplasia of optic nerve
Achromatopsia
Cataract
Dysplasia of optic nerve
Glaucoma
Retinopathy of prematurity
Achromatopsia
Retinopathy of prematurity
Glaucoma
Retinopathy of prematurity
Achromatopsia
Retinopathy of prematurity
Retinopathy of prematurity
Foveal hyploplasia
a
Each blind child’s Snellen chart visual acuity was converted into the logarithm of the minimum
angle of resolution or LogMAR computed as follows: LogMAR ¼ 2 Log (Snellen Decimal Acuity;
e.g. 1.3 ¼ 2 Log(20/400); Holladay, 1997).
The parents of the sighted children were initially recruited from advertisements in
local newspapers and had indicated that their children were available for research at the
Department of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego.
The children were aged between 4 and 12 years and the children in the two
groups were individually matched on age, gender, and ethnic background (see Table 2).
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Blindness, theory of mind and basic emotions
511
Table 2. Age (in years and months), gender, and ethnicity of the pairs of blind and sighted children
Blind
Sighted
Gender
Ethnicity
5.0
5.4
5.8
5.8
5.9
5.1
6.5
6.8
6.11
7.7
8.2
8.7
8.8
8.9
9.3
9.6
9.6
10.6
10.6
11.8
4.6
5.4
5.9
5.2
6.0
5.1
6.2
6.2
7.0
7.2
8.2
8.0
9.2
8.2
9.3
8.5
9.4
10.2
10.2
12.8
Female
Male
Female
Female
Female
Female
Female
Male
Female
Female
Female
Female
Male
Male
Female
Female
Female
Female
Female
Female
White
White
Hispanic
White
White
White
Hispanic
White
White
White
Hispanic
White
White
White
White
Hispanic
White
White
White
White
Each group was divided into two age subgroups (Young: 4–8 years old, Blind, M ¼ 6
years, SD ¼ 0:82; Sighted, M ¼ 5 years and 9 months, SD ¼ 0:83; Old: 8–12 years old,
Blind, M ¼ 9 years and 6 months, SD ¼ 1:10; Sighted, M ¼ 9 years and 4 months,
SD ¼ 1:44).
The two groups were also matched on verbal ability measured by syntactic
complexity. It was not possible to use a standard psychometric instrument
(e.g. Peabody) for both blind and sighted children for three reasons. First, most of the
standardized tests of verbal ability have visual components that are inappropriate for
blind children; second, tests of verbal ability used to assess blind children’s linguistic
proficiency are not comparable in their psychometric value to those used for sighted
children (i.e. they are not standardized and age-normed, and their predictive value for
intelligence and academic achievement is not well established); third, given the wide
age range of the participants, it would have been impossible to use the same test for the
whole sample. Therefore, verbal ability was assessed on the basis of naturalistic
observations of verbal interactions between family members using Reilly, Bates, and
Marchman’s (1998) methodology for assessing and coding complex syntax. Linguistic
proficiency for both the blind and sighted children was taken as the frequency of
complex propositions uttered within the first 100 conversational turns recorded at
home during 1 hour of verbal interactions between family members. Complex
propositions consisted of embedded propositions containing at least two verbs and
falling within a sentence intonation contour. The categorization followed the coding
scheme proposed by Reilly et al. (1998):
(1)
Coordinate propositions (and, or, but; e.g. ‘First I painted it, then I put it out and
after that a mask of Santa Claus appeared’);
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512 Anne-Catherine Roch-Levecq
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
Sentences with subordinate adverbial clauses (e.g. when, where, since, because, if,
then, and so; e.g. ‘Because they wouldn’t come out the tunnel’);
Sentences with verb complements (e.g. say (that) þ S (S ¼ Subject), try þ Verb
( V ¼ Verb), start þ V, want þ V/S; e.g. ‘I want to get a new board’);
Relative clauses (e.g. ‘Who gets them down first loses’);
Auxiliaries (e.g. must þ V, can þ V, may þ V, need þ V, gonna þ V, Let þ V,
supposed þ V, get þ V, etc.; e.g. ‘You can give me some more’);
Questions (e.g. what, who, when, why, where, how, etc,; e.g. ‘What’s next on the
timetable?’).
There was no difference between the groups on the mean frequency of complex
sentences (Blind, M ¼ 63:50, SD ¼ 15:64; Sighted, M ¼ 60:25, SD ¼ 16:45;
tð38Þ ¼ 0:66, p ¼ :51), indicating that the blind and sighted children were of similar
linguistic proficiency. There was no difference either between age subgroups, p . :05,
or within any linguistic category, p . :05.
Procedure
Families who met the criteria (i.e. target age range, and for the blind children, blindness
from birth and a currently legally blind status with no other physical or cognitive
disability) were visited at home for a single session of about 3 hours. The experimental
tasks were administered during the visit usually after videotaping a period of family
interaction. The procedure and results of the study of family interactions are reported in
detail elsewhere (e.g. Roch-Levecq, 2001). The tasks were administered in a quiet place,
usually the child’s bedroom, and lasted about 30 minutes. This activity was videotaped.
The experimenter/observer introduced the child to the experimental tasks with a
warm-up task that consisted of giving the child each of the objects used later as props in
the false belief task (e.g. Cheerios/pennies, raisins/paper clips, etc,) and asking what they
were called. The tasks were then administered in a fixed order: the false belief task first,
then the interpretative narrative, and finally, the emotion labelling and mapping tasks.
All parents completed two questionnaires, one on the family’s socio-economic
background and one on the family’s history of psychological disorders. Parents of the
blind children completed a third questionnaire on the child’s visual status, aetiology of
the blindness, type and frequency of any surgery and effect on visual acuity, type of
education and/or training (e.g. mainstream schooling, frequency of contacts with a
teacher for visually impaired children, Braille reading and writing, training in orientation
and mobility).
Measures
The false belief task
The children’s understanding of false belief was tested in a series of six vignettes. In each
of these the children were asked to account for the false belief of a protagonist, to
predict his/her behaviour on the basis of his/her false belief, and to give an explanation
of his/her behaviour. These vignettes were modelled on the change of content
paradigm, a variant of the false belief paradigm developed by Wimmer and Perner
(1983). The six vignettes were similarly structured but used different dolls (e.g. Big Bird,
Minnie Mouse) and different props (e.g. a cup, Cheerios). (For an example, see
Appendix A).
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Blindness, theory of mind and basic emotions
513
The vignettes were presented to the child in a pretend mode. The child was first
introduced to the protagonist, a doll, who wanted something (to eat, to play, to fulfil a
specific goal). The protagonist put the desired object into a container (e.g. Cheerios),
closed it with a lid, and then left for a specified reason (going to the bathroom to wash
hands, answering the phone, etc). While the protagonist was absent from the scene, the
experimenter pretended that someone else came in, took the desired object and
replaced it with another object, which obstructed the goal of the protagonist
(e.g. exchanged Cheerios for pennies, raisins for paper clips, water for sand, etc,). Then,
the experimenter asked the child two memory and reality checking questions (‘What
did [name of protagonist] put here in the box?’ ‘What is there now?’).
Then the protagonist was brought back to the scene by the experimenter and the
child was asked the false belief questions (‘What does [name of protagonist] think is
[in the box]?’ ‘What will he look for?’). If the second question was answered correctly,
the child was asked the explanation question (‘Why will he look for [name of the
object]?’). The presentation order of the vignettes was randomized across participants.
The task was slightly modified for the blind children to facilitate access to key
information through auditory and tactile modalities as illustrated in the example in
Appendix A.
In order to assess how the children processed the information, unlike previous
studies, each question was scored. Children were credited with 1 point for each correct
answer. If the child answered incorrectly the first time, but spontaneously corrected
him/herself, 1 point was credited. Zero points were given if the child had to be
prompted. If the child offered a false belief explanation (e.g. ‘He thought the Cheerios
were still there.’), using a mental verb contrasting with the reality-given alternative, s/he
was credited 1 point. For all other answers, zero points were given. The maximum total
score on this task was 30 (5 points £ 6 vignettes).
The narrative task
The narrative task described in Appendix B was inspired by studies of second-order
attributions (Perner & Wimmer 1985; Sullivan, Winner, & Hopfield, 1995). It
consisted of a plausible story about an ‘omniscient’ mother. Its purpose was to
provide knowledge about the progression of the children’s understanding of mental
entities such as desire, belief, false belief, belief change, and most important, the
recursivity of mind.
Correct answers to questions that assessed facts, desires, and knowledge of lying and
did not require explanation or inference scored 1 point (see Appendix B). Correct
answers to questions that required inference, explanation, and/or a mental proposition
scored 2 points (see Appendix B). When the child provided the right answer to these
latter questions spontaneously and without prompting, 2 points were credited, but
only 1 point was given if prompting was required. The maximum total score on this task
was 19.
The emotion understanding and mapping task
The emotion understanding and mapping task had two components: children were
asked to (a) verbally identify four basic emotions (i.e. fear, happiness, sadness, anger)
which would occur typically in specific situations, and ( b) act out these basic emotions
on their face. The presentation order of the situations was randomized across
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514 Anne-Catherine Roch-Levecq
participants. The situations were as follows, each followed by the prompt, ‘Show me
how you feel on your face’:
–‘How do you feel when you hear/see a big mean dog approaching?’
(Correct answer: afraid/scared)
–‘How do you feel when you receive a new gift?’
(Correct answer: happy)
–‘How do you feel when your mother tells you cannot play with your friend?’
(Correct answer: sad)
–‘How do you feel when someone pushes you?’
(Correct answer: mad/angry)
Prior to scoring, the video clips, which showed the children’s faces and shoulders as
they enacted each emotion, were assembled on to a tape as follows. Each expression
was watched in slow motion to identify the moment the expressive movement started
to the moment it finished. The resulting clips lasted 3 seconds on average. The 160
expressions (4 emotions £ 20 children £ 2 groups) were copied on to a videotape.
There were four blocks of 40 clips each. The clips were randomly selected but organized
in pairs with a blind child’s expression followed by the matched sighted child’s
expression in the same situation, so that blind and sighted children’s expressions were
displayed alternatively. Also, within each block, there were five examples of the four
emotions (5 examples £ 4 emotions £ 2 groups ¼ 40 clips). A blank screen was
displayed for 3 seconds between clips.
To score verbal identification, the procedure used by Dunn, Brown, & Bearsdall
(1991) was followed. The children received a score of 2 for correct identification, but
only 1 for identifying positive/negative dimensions (e.g. ‘I feel bad’ rather than ‘I feel
angry/sad/afraid’ would be given a 1-point score). The maximum total score was 8.
To score for ‘mapping’ or enactment, 24 adults free from any vision problems and naı̈ve to
the status of the children and the hypotheses, were recruited from college students at
the University of California San Diego. They were seated at a comfortable distance from a
television screen (17’diagonal). Before displaying the videotape, the experimenter instructed
each rater to label each expression as either scared, happy, sad, angry, or to say, ‘I do not
know’ when the expression did not match any of the four emotions. Each rater labelled the
children’s expressions for two blocks. The presentation order of the two blocks was
randomized and counterbalanced across raters. Thus, there were 12 possible arrangements
of the two blocks scored by each rater (i.e. blocks 1 and 2, 1 and 3, 1 and 4, 2 and 3, 2 and 4, 3
and 4, and the blocks in the reverse order) Permutation ¼ P4 2 ¼ 4!=ð4 2 2Þ!.
Each block was rated by 12 raters. Thus each child’s expression was rated 12 times.
The mean percentage of agreement between raters across the four emotions was 80.3%
for the blind group, and 82.1% for the sighted group.1
1
For each child’s expression, the percentage agreement across the 12 raters was determined by computing the number of
agreements over the sum of the number of agreements and number of disagreements. Percentages of agreement thus
obtained were averaged across children within each group for each emotion. The means percentages agreement for each
emotion for the blind group were 85.4% (SD ¼ 13) for fear, 79.6% (SD ¼ 16.1) for happiness, 75.2% (SD ¼ 20.8) for
sadness, and 80.8% (SD ¼ 16) for anger. The means percentages agreement for each emotion for the sighted group were
73.3% (SD ¼ 12.3) for fear, 92.5% (SD ¼ 10.8) for happiness, 80% (SD ¼ 13.9) for sadness, and 82.5% (SD ¼ 12.4) for
anger. Then a final reliability rate for each group was determined by computing the average of percentage agreements across
the four emotions within each group. Thus, the mean percentage agreement for the blind group was 80.3%, and 82.1% for the
sighted group.
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Blindness, theory of mind and basic emotions
515
The scoring of the ratings proceeded as follows. In order to ensure that the
experimenter could not see which child was being rated, each rater gave his/her ratings
verbally and these were recorded by the experimenter away from the TV screen on a
record sheet without the child’s identification number and the label of the emotion the
child was supposed to enact. Following the same logic as for the identification part of
the task, if the rater said ‘happy’ when the child was supposed to display a sad face, the
rating received a score of 2 2 to account for the greater distance between positive and
negative expressions compared with the distance between two negative expressions.
If the rater said ‘angry’ when the child was supposed to display a sad face, the rating
received a score of 2 1. If the label matched the emotion acted out by the child (e.g. the
rater said ‘sad’ for a sad face) a score of 0 was credited. If the rater said, ‘I do not know’, a
score of 2 1 was given. The scores for each clip given by the 12 raters were added and
could range from 2 24 to 0, where 0 indicated that all raters rated the expression as
matching that which was requested.
Results
The false belief task
Since the sighted children performed at ceiling with almost no variance, non-parametric
Mann–Whitney U tests were used. The blind children performed at the same level as the
sighted children on the memory- and reality-check questions, with all the children
performing above chance, z ¼ 0:78, p ¼ :43, (see Table 3). On the false belief questions
the blind children performed at a significantly lower level than the sighted children,
z ¼ 2:25, p ¼ :004 (see Table 3). The younger blind children performed at a significantly
lower level than their younger counterparts in the sighted group, z ¼ 2:27, p , :05
(Blind, M ¼ 8:2, SD ¼ 4:32 vs. Sighted, M ¼ 11:8, SD ¼ :42), and marginally lower than
the older blind children, z ¼ 21:81, p ¼ :07, (Young, M ¼ 8:2, SD ¼ 4:32 vs. Old,
M ¼ 11:4, SD ¼ 1:07), but there was no difference between the groups at the older age,
p ¼ :28. The main prediction that blind children would perform at a significantly lower
level than sighted children was confirmed.
Very few children provided correct explanations: three in the older blind group and
four in the older sighted group. As a result there was no difference between the groups,
Table 3. Comparison of scores on the false belief task between children with congenital blindness and
sighted children using Mann–Whitney U tests
False belief task
Mean total score (max ¼ 30)
Mean (SD)
Mean score on memory and reality
(max ¼ 12)
Mean (SD)
Mean score on false belief
(max ¼ 12)
Mean (SD)
Mean score on explanation
(max ¼ 6)
Mean (SD)
Blind (N ¼ 20)
Sighted (N ¼ 20)
p value
21.05 (6.13)
24.15 (3.25)
.64
10.4 (2.28)
11.15 (1.66)
.43
9.80 (3.47)
11.90 (0.31)
.004
0.85 (1.84)
1.10 (2.29)
.64
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516 Anne-Catherine Roch-Levecq
p ¼ :64 (see Table 3). Among the children who correctly predicted what the protagonist
would do on the false belief question, most justified their answer in terms of actions
(e.g. ‘Because he put Cheerios in here’), rather than in mental state terms as described in
Appendix A. In the present study, verbal ability, measured by syntactic complexity, did
not correlate with performance, p . :05, for both groups.
There were correlations between performance on the false belief tasks and age in
both groups, Spearman rð20Þ ¼ 0:58, p , :01 and Spearman rð20Þ ¼ 0:55, p , :05,
blind and sighted, respectively. Factors confounded with blindness such as prematurity,
aetiology, and visual acuity were also analysed. The main factor that discriminated blind
children was visual acuity as measured by logMAR equivalents. LogMar equivalents were
significantly correlated with total score on the false belief task, Spearman
rð20Þ ¼ 20:47, p , :05, and more specifically with the scores on the false belief
questions, Spearman rð20Þ ¼ 20:58, p , :01.
To summarize, children with congenital blindness were more likely to fail the false
belief task than sighted children. Four out of 20 children with congenital blindness
compared with none of the sighted children did not provide the correct false belief
answer in five out of the six vignettes, x2 ð1Þ ¼ 4:4, p ¼ :03. Their answers referred to
the reality-based solution as is reported for typically-developing sighted 3-year-old
children. However, two younger blind children were confused by irrelevant and
extraneous information, in contrast with sighted 3-year-olds.
The narrative task
Mann–Whitney U tests revealed a similar pattern of findings as for the false belief task.
The blind children performed significantly less well than the sighted children, z ¼ 2:04,
p ¼ :04, (see Table 4). The younger blind children scored lower than their sighted
Table 4. Comparison of scores on the narrative task between children with congenital blindness and
sighted children using Mann–Whitney U tests
Narrative task
Mean total score (max ¼ 19)
Mean (SD)
Zero-degree order of inference
(max ¼ 3)
Mean (SD)
First-degree order of inference
(max ¼ 1)
Mean (SD)
False belief and attribution questions
(max ¼ 4)
Mean (SD)
Representational change questions
(max ¼ 4)
Mean (SD)
Second-degree order of inference
(max ¼ 4)
Mean (SD)
Emotion questions (max ¼ 3)
Mean (SD)
Blind (N ¼ 20)
Sighted (N ¼ 20)
p value
11.95 (5.27)
15.45 (2.63)
.04
2.6 (0.75)
3.0 (0)
.02
0.9 (0.31)
0.9 (0.31)
1.00
2.25 (1.59)
3.35 (0.99)
.02
2.70 (1.45)
3.60 (0.82)
.03
1.65 (1.46)
2.3 (1.63)
.19
1.75 (1.02)
2.3 (0.98)
.08
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Blindness, theory of mind and basic emotions
517
counterparts, z ¼ 2:23, p ¼ :03, (Blind, M ¼ 9:1, SD ¼ 4:86, vs. Sighted, M ¼ 14:2,
SD ¼ 2:25), and the older blind children, z ¼ 22:38, p ¼ :01 (Old, M ¼ 14:8,
SD ¼ 4:10). There was no difference between the groups at the older age, p . :05.
Correlations between scores on this task and on the false belief task were significant,
Spearman rð40Þ ¼ 0:81, p , :001 for the whole sample and for the blind and sighted
groups separately, Spearman rð20Þ ¼ 0:84 and 0.72, both p , :001, respectively.
The different types of questions presented in the narrative were examined to shed
light on the blind children’s comprehension of the coherence of the story as reflected by
their understanding of the underlying causal relationships between events,
behaviours/actions in the world and people’s representations and/or interpretations.
The questions showed a progression from zero-degree order of inference to first-degree
order of inference and then to second-degree order of inference. Since the questions had
different degrees of difficulty or degrees of inference, separate tests were computed for
each in order to determine where differences between the blind and sighted groups lay.
It was mostly the questions requiring the children to draw first-degree order of inference
involving false belief attribution and representational change associated with the
understanding of false belief that discriminated the blind and sighted children (see Table 4).
False belief attribution questions (false belief and attribution questions aggregated mean
score), z ¼ 2:33, p ¼ :02, representational change questions (critical-event and changebelief questions aggregated mean score), z ¼ 2:18, p ¼ :03, and emotion questions
(aggregated mean score), z ¼ 1:66, p ¼ :08 (marginally significant), yielded differences
(see Table 4). Second-order attribution questions (second-order ignorance and secondorder knowledge questions aggregated mean score), z ¼ 1:27, p ¼ :19, did not
differentiate blind and sighted children (see Table 4). Five participants failed the desire,
fact, and lying questions requiring no inference (‘zero-degree order of inference’ aggregated
mean score for desire, fact, and lying questions) and all of these were blind, z ¼ 2:36,
p ¼ :02 (See Table 4). Four of these children were in the younger blind group.
There were correlations between performance on this task and age in both groups,
Spearman rð20Þ ¼ 0:52, p , :05, and rð20Þ ¼ 0:53, p , :05 for the blind and sighted
children, respectively. Correlations with verbal ability measured by syntactic complexity
were not significant in either group, p . :05.
Again, as for the standard false belief task, the main factor that discriminated blind
children was visual acuity as measured by logMAR equivalents. LogMar equivalents were
significantly correlated with total score on the narrative task, Spearman rð20Þ ¼ 20:46,
p , :05. There was also an association between visual acuity and the false belief scores
aggregated across the false belief and narrative tasks, Spearman rð20Þ ¼ 20:58, p , :01.
The emotion understanding and mapping task
Mann–Whitney U test failed to yield any difference in the ability of the sighted and blind
children to identify emotion verbally, z ¼ 0:75, p ¼ :48. There were no differences
between the groups in any of the four emotions analysed separately, p . :05. This result
suggested that blind and sighted children had the same understanding of the basic
emotions evoked by the stereotyped situations.
On the other hand, there was a significant difference between the two groups in the
ability to express basic emotions through facial expressions. A Mann–Whitney U test on
the total scores of the adults’ ratings of the children’s expressions revealed that
the sighted children were more able to convey the appropriate emotion facially than the
blind children, z ¼ 23:77, p , :001 (see Table 5). When examined separately, the
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518 Anne-Catherine Roch-Levecq
Table 5. Comparison of scores on the emotion understanding and mapping task between children with
congenital blindness and sighted children using Mann–Whitney U tests
Emotion task
Blind (N ¼ 20)
Verbal identification
(max ¼ 8)
Mean (SD)
6.45 (1.39)
Mapping (adults’ ratings)
Mean total score
(range 0 to 2 96)
Mean (SD)
241.95 (13.04)
Ratings of ‘Scared’ expressions
(range 0 to 2 24)
Mean (SD)
212.8 (6.24)
Ratings of ‘Happy’ expressions
(range 0 to 2 24)
Mean (SD)
210.3 (7.48)
Ratings of ‘Sad’ expressions
(range 0 to 2 24)
Mean (SD)
28.85 (5.58)
Ratings of ‘Angry’ expressions
(range 0 to 2 24)
Mean (SD)
210 (4.96)
Ratings of ‘Non-identifiable’ expressions
(range 0 to 2 12)a
Mean (SD)
25.85 (2.91)
Sighted (N ¼ 20)
p value
6.75 (1.37)
.480
2 26 (10.76)
,.001
2 7.95 (5.84)
.01
2 1.65 (2.28)
,.001
2 5.95 (5.03)
.13
2 10.4 (4.47)
.75
2 3.10 (2.20)
.003
a
The ‘non-identifiable’ ratings were here analysed separately in terms of frequency, and no longer in
terms of distance from the correct facial display, as done for the analyses on the ratings of the four
emotions above. Thus, for the ‘non-identifiable’ ratings, the minus sign should be ignored.
emotions that yielded a difference between the two groups were fear (‘scared’) and
happiness (‘happy’), z ¼ 22:57, p ¼ :01, and z ¼ 23:83, p , :001, respectively,
indicating that the sighted children were more able to convey fear and happiness than
the blind children (see Table 5). Wilcoxon-matched pairs tests across the four emotions
revealed significant differences between positive (happy) and negative (scared, sad and
angry) emotions for the sighted children, p , :001, but not for the blind children
( p . :29). Bonferroni correction was applied and set at p ¼ :004 ¼ :05=12 for six
comparisons in each group. This suggested that it was significantly more difficult for the
adult raters to discriminate the blind children’s facial expressions, even between
positive and negative emotions, compared with the sighted children’s facial
expressions.
The difficulty that the blind children had in expressing emotions facially was further
confirmed by Mann–Whitney U tests on the ‘non-identifiable’ ratings analysed separately
in terms of frequency. The blind children received more ‘I do not know’ ratings than the
sighted children, z ¼ 22:98, p ¼ :003 (see Table 5). The young blind children elicited
the highest frequencies, z ¼ 23:02, p , :01 (Young Blind, M ¼ 26:7, SD ¼ 2:36 vs.
Young Sighted, M ¼ 23:00, SD ¼ 1:70). However, the correlation between age and
non-identifiable ratings within the blind group was not significant, p ¼ :16, indicating
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Blindness, theory of mind and basic emotions
519
that the younger blind children were not the only ones to produce uninterpretable
expressions.
Unlike the two false belief tasks, on this task, there was no correlation between
visual acuity logMAR equivalents and adults’ ratings, p . :05, suggesting that blind
children with some residual vision were not conveying more accurate information than
totally blind children.
Relationship between false belief understanding and adults’ ratings of emotion
enactment
The correlations between the total scores of each false belief task and adult ratings of the
children’s expressions were weak, Spearman rð40Þ ¼ 0:29, p ¼ :06 for the false belief
task, and Spearman rð40Þ ¼ 0:21, p . :05 for the narrative task. However, since only
answers to the false belief questions are informative of the understanding of people’s
minds, and significantly discriminated the blind from the sighted children compared
with other questions, the relationship between scores on the false belief questions and
adult ratings of emotion expressions was examined. The scores on the false belief
questions of the false belief task (i.e. ‘think’ and ‘look’) and the narrative task (i.e. false
belief and false belief attribution questions) were aggregated. The correlation between
total adult ratings and the aggregated scores on the false belief questions was significant,
Spearman rð40Þ ¼ 0:43, p , :01, as was the correlation between frequency of ‘nonidentifiable’ ratings and aggregated scores, Spearman rð40Þ ¼ 0:46, p , :01. Taken
together, these results suggest a link between the development of the understanding of
people’s minds as measured by the false belief and narrative tasks and the ability to map
emotional expressions on faces.
Discussion
Consistent with previous findings, the results on the false belief tasks showed that the
blind children, especially the younger ones, had difficulties understanding another
person’s mind. These findings are consistent with Minter et al. (1998) who used a tactile
version of and Wimmer’s and Perner’s (1983) original false belief task and found that 10
out of 21 visually-impaired participants failed the false belief question compared with
two out of 21 sighted participants. They are also consistent with McAlpine and Moore’s
(1995) finding that children with a visual acuity below 20/240 failed Perner, Leekam,
and Wimmer’s (1987) version of the ‘smarties vs. pencils’ false belief task, even at a
considerably older age (11 years old). Also, consistent with Peterson et al. (2000), the
younger blind children in the present study performed significantly less well than the
older blind children and their younger sighted counterparts. Recently, using false belief
tasks that varied in the extent of deception and involvement of the child, Green et al.
(2004) replicated Minter et al. (1998) but found that verbal IQ and verbal mental age
discriminated children with good and poor performance.
Findings on the false belief tasks have been explained on the basis that blindness
reduces access to information, which affects information-processing and representation
(Roch-Levecq, 2001). However, the association between adults’ ratings of emotional
expression and scores on false belief tasks reported in the present paper showing that
adult raters were less likely to identify emotional expression among those children
who scored low on the false beliefs, i.e. children with congenital blindness, points to
a second possible explanation that appears to be at play in combination with the first
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520 Anne-Catherine Roch-Levecq
one: reduced information provided to interlocutors, which impedes the operation of a
mutual feedback loop.
Recall that blind children were just as able as sighted children to understand the
underlying cause-effect relationships that evoke basic emotions, but their expressions
did not convey such basic emotions to others as well as sighted children. It is not a trivial
achievement for children with congenital blindness to recognize situations that elicit
fear, happiness, sadness, and anger, even in culturally-stereotyped situations as
presented in our vignettes. This achievement reflects the fact that, unlike most children
with autism, blind children remain connected to the world and are able to assimilate in a
meaningful and coherent way the underlying causes of emotion into their repertoire of
experiences. Although children with autism are not visually impaired, they have
difficulties not only in recognizing emotional expression, but also in understanding the
social situations that elicit emotions (Sigman & Capps, 1997). Such understanding
determines the formation of emotional connections with others, which have to be
predictable for regulation of one’s emotional expression.
It seems that the narrative vignettes used in this study tapped into the experiences of
the self. It is tempting at this point to raise Harris’s (1991) simulation theory of the self as
a working model of people with minds, which postulates that children understand
others’ minds by using simulations of the self in the same situations. But in this
experiment, the children were not asked to extrapolate to ‘others’ feelings, thereby
restricting its validity as a measure of understanding of emotions. How would blind
children have fared if they had been asked about another person’s feelings? In passing,
on the emotion-questions of the narrative task, they were able to infer the right emotion
(anger) in the mother as well as sighted children, even though they were less able to
justify it in mental terms. But how would have they fared in less stereotyped situations,
which could have evoked more sophisticated emotions such as surprise, interest,
disgust, guilt, or embarrassment?
The ultimate purpose of this experiment was to test the ability of children with
congenital blindness to map fear, happiness, sadness and anger on to their own face.
Although children with congenital blindness have other modalities available to
experience the world, compared with sighted children who apprehend the world in a
direct ‘teleceptive and prehensory’ fashion (Gesell, Ilg, & Bullis, 1949), their access to
the causal links between people’s expressions and the contexts that induce those
expressions remains limited. Their only physically-available reference is their own body.
Unlike sighted children, they cannot learn the relationships between people’s emotions
and the events that precipitate them through direct visual perception of people’s facial
expressions. Their experiences of emotion as an interpersonal phenomenon are likely
to be limited because of the inherent restraints in navigation, orientation, attention, and
social interaction in general posed by blindness. The present study has shown that the
blind children’s expressions were more difficult to identify and to discriminate than the
sighted children’s. This result was in line with the suggestion by Galati et al. (2001, 2003)
that blind children’s voluntary expressions might be differentiated from sighted
children’s. It was also consistent with previous studies, which stressed blind children’s
restricted facial and body expressiveness (e.g. Fraiberg, 1977).
The further finding that children’s aggregated scores on the false belief questions
were correlated with the adults’ ratings of their emotional expressions, suggests a link
between understanding of people’s minds and the ability to map basic emotions on
one’s body. That is, the children whose expressions of emotions were least likely to be
rated correctly by adults were least likely to succeed on the false attribution tasks.
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Blindness, theory of mind and basic emotions
521
This link has often been suggested on intuitive grounds by theorists such as Meltzoff and
Gopnik (1994) and Hobson (1991).
How is the link between perceptions, sensations and actions on bodies, especially on
‘my’ body, and the understanding of ‘others’ mental states established during
development? One way to explore this is to consider early development when primitive
forms of relatedness to others or primary inter-subjectivity (Trevarthen, 1979, 1993)
emerge from the face-to-face interactions between infant and caregivers.
Meltzoff and Moore (1977, 1989, 1994) showed that sighted human new-borns were
able to reproduce on their own bodies adults’ facial expressions such as tongue
protrusion, lip protrusion, and mouth opening. Using emotional expressions (happy,
sad, surprised), Field et al. (1982) also showed that 36-hour old infants reliably imitated
those expressions. Overall, it seems that from a very young age sighted infants are
capable of matching their facial movements to those seen on the faces of another human
being. These authors hypothesized that such ability points to an early supra-modal form
of internal representation that Piaget (1962) did not think possible before 8 months.
Meltzoff and Gopnik (1994) proposed that infants use their internal sense of
proprioception to detect cross-modal equivalents between the movements-as-felt and
the movements they see performed by others. For sighted children, these analogue
somatic experiences are the first instances of a connection between the outside visible
world of others and infants’ invisible felt states. The detection of body analogies may be
the first avenue to appreciating consciousness, although the infant does not yet make
any attribution of mental state to the self or the other.
However, there might be another complementary explanation to account for
infants’ ability to bridge the gap between what they see on the faces of other persons
and what they feel on their own faces. Gergely and Watson (1996) argued that
contingent parental affect mirroring, when parents imitate the infant’s expressions,
provides the infant with social biofeedback, critical for the infant’s regulation of
his/her emotional states and the construction of representations of him/herself. This
explanation represents a shift from internal cues provided by proprioception to
external cues provided by sight. Gergely and Watson hypothesized that the
psychological mechanism involved in affect-mirroring is the same as provided in
biofeedback procedures. That is, infants regulate their internal states on the basis of
on-line perceptual access to their caregiver’s emotional facial expression, just as a
patient suffering from anxiety disorder can learn to regulate his or her internal states
(heartbeat, muscle tension) from a monitor recording on-line the current states of his
or her muscles, heart, and so on.
The first foundation of this social biofeedback system of communication is the
infant’s ability to detect contingencies between stimuli and responses. New-borns are
endowed with contingency-detection sensitivities that allow for some form of
conditional probability analysis between stimuli and responses which, according to
Watson (1979, 1994), could go either forward, that is, from stimulus to response or
backward, from response to stimulus. We know already that infants, and even
premature new-borns (Bråten, 1992), are able to respond to stimuli and to generate
stimuli so contingently that the cycle of interaction between infant and caregiver has
been compared with a ‘musical duet’. In turn, this attunement contributes to parental
attachment manifest in the way parents mirror their infant’s facial and body expressions.
This is the second foundation of the social biofeedback system: parents instinctively
mirror the infant’s expressions in an exaggerated fashion.
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522 Anne-Catherine Roch-Levecq
According to Gergely and Watson (1996), exaggeration is a crucial element which
precludes any misattribution of the infant’s emotional display to the parent. In other
words, the parental display is ‘suspended’ or ‘decoupled from its referent’ ( p. 1199).
Because of the contingent nature of the marked parental display, ‘the infant’s
contingency-detection system will register the temporal contingency and cross-modal
similarity of pattern between the parent’s expression and his/her ongoing affective
behaviour.’ ( p. 1199). In other words, ‘the infant will anchor the marked mirroring
display as expressing his/her own self-state’ (p. 1199). The authors argued further that
since the mirrored display is separated from the real emotional display, the infant can
build secondary representations, or an ‘as if’ mode of communication.
Visual deprivation takes its toll on such a system that is so heavily dependant on
visual cues. Parent’s affect – mirroring of the infant’s emotional expressions falls into a
void with blind children who, in turn, cannot ‘anchor’ anything. If established at all,
the feedback loop between the blind child and his or her caregiver could easily loose its
contingent, synchronous, and reciprocal qualities.
It could be argued that touch and audition may serve the same function. This is
probably partially true. On the negative side, recall the finding by Minter et al. (1991)
that children with congenital blindness had difficulties discriminating between different
intonations of human vocalization. However, Fraiberg (1974) designed a training
method to help blind infants and their parents establish the feedback loop described
above using touch. She taught parents to attend carefully to the way their children used
their hands to signal their intentions and reactions and how to organize their baby’s
environment to encourage interaction. With appropriate feedback, the blind children
began to develop social smiling. More recently, Norgate, Collis, and Lewis (1998)
showed how time- and sequence-based shared activities such as rhymes and routines
could enhance mutual engagement through touch and sound between parent and blind
child, but not necessarily cognitive functioning.
One might argue that parents would have discriminated their blind child’s
expressions better than college students who are not commonly exposed to blind
children. Yet, Minter et al. (1991) argued that limited expressions might ‘hinder adults’
attempts to help the children conceptualize their own feelings, in that parents may find
the expressions less striking and less easily discriminable than those of sighted children’
( p. 411). It can be further inferred that blind children’s understanding of emotion might
be as limited as their perception and expression of emotion are. Minter et al. actually
found that children with congenital blindness had significantly more difficulties in
recognizing human vocalizations of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust
than in recognizing non-emotional sounds of birds, vehicles, and so on, compared with
matched sighted controls. This is not surprising if blind children are delayed or even
impaired in their abilities to represent on their own body expressions of basic emotions
since with the loss of sight, they also lose the possibility of establishing a mutual
feedback loop.
The correlations between ratings of children’s ability to map expressions of basic
emotions on their faces and children’s scores on false belief attribution tasks have
interesting implications. First, the feedback loop of affect-mirroring described by
Gergely and Watson (1996) establishes very early in life a primitive yet already
elaborate form of inter-subjectivity, a ‘somatic’ or embodied form of inter-subjectivity.
A higher-degree order form of inter-subjectivity, a ‘theory of mind’, capitalizes on it
later to create new social affordances and a mind-to-mind function. Second, in
connectionist terms, affect-mirroring provides psycho-affective visual experiences that
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Blindness, theory of mind and basic emotions
523
feed algorithms as inputs giving rise to a gradual modularization of social
understanding in interaction with inputs from other sensory modalities such as
speech recognition and touch. How the lack of experience of seeing and being seen
affects the quality of everyday interactions would be the next question to examine,
but is beyond the scope of this discussion.
Acknowledgements
This article reports findings from the author’s doctoral dissertation (2001). I acknowledge
Professor Michael Cole for his guidance. This paper is dedicated to Professor Lisa Capps. I am
indebted to the participating children and their families. I thank Professor Joan Stiles, Director of
the Center of Human Development at UCSD, Dr. David Granet, Director of the Ratner Children’s
Eye Center at UCSD, the teachers of visually impaired of San Diego County, the Director of
the National Association of Parents of Visually Impaired, and the Director of the Blind Children’s
Center in Los Angeles, who directed me to families. Many thanks to Professor Vicky Lewis and
three anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of the paper and Dr. Clarissa
Reese for reviewing the manuscript.
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Received 10 September 2002; revised version received 3 March 2005
Appendix A: The false belief task
One example of the six vignettes used in the false belief task:
‘Here is Andy’.
Experimenter (E) gives the child a boy doll to hold.
‘Andy wants Cheerios for his breakfast.’
E gives the blind child some Cheerios and says: ‘These are Cheerios, right?’
E shows the sighted child that the container contains Cheerios and says: ‘These are
Cheerios, right?’
‘He puts some Cheerios here.’ (In a cup)
‘Then Andy leaves to go to the kitchen to get some milk from the fridge.’
E manipulates the doll as if the doll was leaving, encouraging the blind child to
feel the movements.
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526 Anne-Catherine Roch-Levecq
The sighted child sees the doll leaving and disappearing.
‘Now someone comes in, takes the Cheerios out of the cup and puts some
pennies instead.’
E encourages the blind child to feel the empty container and says:
E encourages the sighted child to look into the now empty container and says:
‘You see/feel, it’s empty now, no more Cheerios.’
E puts pennies into the cup and says:
‘See/feel, there are pennies now, no more Cheerios.’
E takes the blind child’s hand and encourages him/her to feel the pennies in the
container.
E shows the sighted child that the container contains pennies.
Memory check questions:
(1) ‘What did Andy put in the cup?’
Correct answer ¼ ‘Cheerios’; Score ¼ 1 point
(2) ‘What is there now in the cup?’
Correct answer ¼ ‘pennies’; Score ¼ 1 point
‘Now Andy comes back.’
E brings back the doll and encourages the blind child to feel the movements as the
doll is returned to the scene.
The sighted child sees the doll coming back to the scene
False belief questions:
(1) Mental verb: ‘What does Andy think is in the cup?’
Correct answer ¼ ‘Cheerios’; Score ¼ 1 point
(2) Action verb: ‘What will Andy look for?’
Correct answer ¼ ‘Cheerios’; Score ¼ 1 point
If the child gives a correct answer to the second false belief question, E asks:
Explanation question: ‘Why will he look for Cheerios?’
Correct answer ¼ ‘He will look for Cheerios because he thought the Cheerios were
still there’ or ‘He did not know that someone came in and took the Cheerios’).
Score ¼ 1 point
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Blindness, theory of mind and basic emotions
527
Appendix B: The narrative task
The peas story
Christine has to eat her peas before she can have her favourite dessert, ice
cream, but she really hates peas!
Desire-Question: ‘Does Christine like peas?’ ¼ Zero-Degree Order of Inference
Question. (Correct answer: ‘No’; Score ¼ 1 point)
Her mother has to leave the kitchen where Christine is eating, to answer the
phone. Christine has a good idea, she gives all the peas to the dog.
Fact-Question: ‘Did Christine eat the peas?’ ¼ Zero-Degree Order of Inference
Question. (Correct answer: ‘No’; Score ¼ 1 point)
A few minutes later, her mother comes back. She sees Christine’s plate
empty. Christine: ‘Look Mommy, I finished all my peas! I can have dessert
now!’
False-Belief-Question: What does the mother think? ¼ First-Degree Order of
Inference Question. (Correct answer: ‘She thinks that Christine ate the peas’;
Score ¼ 2 points)
First-Degree Order-Ignorance-Question: ‘Does the mother know that the dog
ate the peas?’ ¼ First-Degree Order of Inference Question. (Correct answer: ‘No’;
Score ¼ 1 point)
Lying-Question: ‘Is Christine telling the truth?’ ¼ Zero-Degree Order of Inference
Question. (Correct answer: ‘No’; Score ¼ 1 point)
Mother: ‘Yes indeed you can! Wonderful, Christine!’ Christine goes to the
fridge and looks for some ice cream.
Attribution of False Belief Question: Is the mother going to punish Christine?
Why? ¼ First-Degree Order of Inference Question.
(Correct answer: ‘No, because she does not know that Christine did not eat the peas’
or ‘No, because she does not know that the dog ate the peas’; Score ¼ 2 points)
But after a while the mother thinks: ‘How come she ate her peas so
quickly?’ At the same time, the mother is watching the dog licking its lips with
some peas still in his mouth and spitting out some peas. Christine is still
looking in the fridge for an ice cream and so does not see her mother looking
at the dog.
Critical-Event Question: ‘Now does the mother know that Christine did not eat
the peas? Why?’ ¼ First-Degree Order of Inference Question.
(Correct answer: ‘Yes because she saw the dog with peas in its mouth’; Score ¼ 2
points)
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528 Anne-Catherine Roch-Levecq
Change-Belief Questions:
(1) ‘Does the mother believe what Christine said (that she ate the peas)?’ ¼ FirstDegree Order of Inference Question. (Correct answer: ‘No’ or ‘Not any
more’; Score ¼ 1 point)
(2) ‘What does the mother think now?’ ¼ First-Degree Order of Inference
Question. (Correct answer: ‘She thinks that Christine did not eat the peas’ or
‘She thinks that Christine lied’; Score ¼ 1 point)
Second-Degree Order Ignorance Question: ‘Does Christine know that her
mother knows she lied when she said she finished the peas?’ Why? ¼ SecondDegree Order of Inference Question.
(Correct answer: ‘No, because she did not see her mother looking at the dog’;
Score ¼ 2 points)
Emotion Question 1: ‘How is the mother feeling about Christine? Why?’ ¼ FirstDegree Order of Inference Question. (Correct answer: ‘She feels mad because
Christine lied to her’; Score ¼ 2 points)
Mother (with angry voice): ‘Christine, are you sure you ate your peas? Did
you lie to me? You gave your peas to the dog, didn’t you?’
Second-Degree Order Knowledge Question: ‘Does Christine know that her
mother knows that the dog ate the peas? Why?’ ¼ Second-Degree Order of
Inference Question.
(Correct answer: ‘Yes, she knows because she heard her mother being angry at her’.
Score ¼ 2 points)
Emotion Question 2: ‘How is the mother feeling about Christine? Why?’ ¼ FirstDegree Order of Inference Question. (Correct answer: ‘Her mother is feeling mad
because Christine lied’. Score ¼ 1 point)
Mother: OK, Christine, I forgive you for this time, but please do not do that
again. Come and sit by me!