Proposal of a tool for evaluating theory of mind in children

Abstract

Theory of mind (ToM) is the human capacity to understand people’s mental states, which allows us to understand and anticipate their behaviour, and therefore has important implications for their socialization. Although there are currently some tools to evaluate this capability, none of them considers the evolution of its main developmental milestones from the most basic to the most advanced. That’s why we designed the ToM Assessment Instrument (IATM), a tool consisting of 17 tasks based on the existing scientific literature, which has been designed to help psychologists to detect those aspects of ToM with which children aged between 3 and 12 years may experience difficulties. Therefore, it is an instrument for the detection social understanding difficulties that aims to contribute to the design of educational interventions adjusted to the specific difficulties of children.