Assessing theory of mind through a conversational situation in patients with schizophrenia.
Résumé
Theory of mind (ToM), refers to the ability to form representations of other people's mental states (e.g. intention, thought, belief) and to use these representations to understand, predict and judge their behaviors and statements (Premack and Woodruff, 1978; Baron-Cohen et al., 1985). Many studies reveal that this ToM ability, which belongs to social cognition, is impaired in most of the patients with schizophrenia (Brune, 2005). The aim of the present study was to assess this ToM ability while the participant is involved in a social interaction. To answer this aim, an original interactive task called “the storytelling in sequence testwas used to assess ToM ability in patients with schizophrenia. This task relies on a psycholinguistic paradigm- the referential communication paradigm (Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986), which reproduces a “natural” conversation situation. The concept of referential communication enables one to assess how interlocutors conversing about how to arrange a set of pictures take into account or not shared knowledge. More specifically, a director (the participant) must produce verbally discriminating information that will enable an addressee (the experimenter) to identify and order six different pictures that constitute a story sequence. From picture to picture, the two interlocutors come to mutually agree on common references, the speaker assuming that the knowledge he/she uses (the common ground) is shared by the listener. This task involves social interaction (which is collaborative since a director has to help an addressee) and the correction of possible misunderstandings signaled by the addressee. We assume that the inappropriate use of reference markers (anaphoric pronouns, definite and indefinite markers) by participants with schizophrenia would reflect their difficulties to take into account and correctly attribute knowledge and belief to their interlocutor (Champagne-Lavau et al., 2009).