DEVELOPMENT OF A THEORY OF MIND IN INDIVIDUALS WITH MENTAL-RETARDATION

The ability of adolescents with mental retardation to reason about oth er people's mental states was examined. Subjects were asked questions about the knowledge and beliefs of characters in stories that they hea rd and saw enacted with props. The adolescents with mental retardation performed worse than did children without mental retardation matched for MA. The adolescents with mental retardation did better on question s requiring first-order reasoning than on those involving second-order reasoning; this pattern is similar to that found previously for child ren without mental retardation.