THEORY OF MIND AND PRAGMATIC UNDERSTANDING FOLLOWING RIGHT-HEMISPHEREDAMAGE

It has been maintained that 3-year-olds' difficulties in correctly pre dicting the undesired outcome of false beliefs reflects difficulties i n interpreting the implications of conversations rather than a concept ual limitation in their theory of mind. As the right hemisphere has be en seen to be responsible for the interpretation of the pragmatic aspe cts of communication, right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) and left-hemisphe re-damaged (LHD) adult patients in our study were compared on their ab ility to correctly draw inferences in false belief tasks. The RHD but not the LHD patients were found to have difficulties similar to those of young children in understanding the conversational implications of test questions. Most reported that a central story character would loo k for a pet in the place where it was really located instead of where the character believed it was located. However, when then asked in a c ontrol question where the pet really was, the RHD patients often switc hed their answer to the test question and referred to the believed loc ation. Removal of the need to infer the questioner's meaning enabled b oth RHD and LHD subjects to make correct false belief predictions. The results are discussed in terms of the effects of brain damage on spat ial memory and the pragmatic demands of theory of mind tasks. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.