What are they all doing in that restaurant? Perspectives on the use of theory of mind.

If "theory of mind" is conceived as reasoning in a strict sense, then it can be said to be useful only at certain times; however, this leaves the rest of social cognition hardly comprehensible. If "theory of mind" is used instead to refer to a mentalist ontology and the consequent awareness that we ourselves and the others function on mental states, then we need new approaches that explain the flow of social experience. To illustrate these points, we outline the general conceptual framework that underlies most empirical studies of theory of mind and discuss their pros and cons; then, we discuss the Theory of Mind Assessment Scale, a tool developed to investigate the complexity of theory of mind, which adopts a different perspective and has been successfully tested on numerous populations.

Looking for social pragmatic communication disorder in the complex world of Italian special needs: an exploratory study.

Social Pragmatic Communication Disorder (SPCD) is characterised by a number of pragmatic difficulties and may lead to obstacles in school readiness. These difficulties also apply to children with Special Needs. Several authors pointed out the difficulty to detect SPCD, also considering the lack of sensitive assessment tools.

Th.o.m.a.s.: new insights into theory of mind in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder.

Previous studies indicated atypical Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at different ages. However, research focused on adolescents with ASD is still rare. This study aims to fill the gaps in the literature, by investigating ToM abilities in adolescents with ASD and in a group of typically developing ones.

A machine-learning approach to investigating the complexity of theory of mind in individuals with schizophrenia.

Individuals with schizophrenia have difficulty attributing mental states to themselves and to others - Theory of Mind (ToM). ToM is a complex, multifaceted theoretical construct comprising first and second order, first and third person, egocentric and allocentric perspective, and cognitive and affective ToM. Most studies addressing ToM deficit in people with schizophrenia consider it an "all-or-nothing" ability and use a classical statistical methodology to test a null hypothesis.

Can Narrative Skills Improve in Autism Spectrum Disorder? A Preliminary Study with Verbally Fluent Adolescents Receiving the Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition affecting social and communicative skills, including narrative ability, namely the description of real-life or fictive accounts of temporally and causally related events. With this study, we aimed to determine whether a communicative-pragmatic training, i.e.

Non-linguistic comprehension, social inference and empathizing skills in autistic young adults, young adults with autistic traits and control young adults: Group differences and interrelatedness of skills.

Background: Despite increasing knowledge of social communication skills of autistic peole, the interrelatedness of different skills such as non-linguistic comprehension, social inference and empathizing skills is not much known about. A better understanding of the complex interplay between different domains of social communication helps us to develop assessment protocols for individuals with social communication difficulties.

Aims: To compare the performances of autistic young adults, young adults with autistic traits identified in childhood and control young adults in social communication tasks measuring non-linguistic comprehension, social inference and empathizing skills.

A cross-sectional study to assess pragmatic strengths and weaknesses in healthy ageing.

Background: Ageing refers to the natural and physiological changes that individuals experience over the years. This process also involves modifications in terms of communicative-pragmatics, namely the ability to convey meanings in social contexts and to interact with other people using various expressive means, such as linguistic, extralinguistic and paralinguistic aspects of communication. Very few studies have provided a complete assessment of communicative-pragmatic performance in healthy ageing.

Multimodal assessment of communicative-pragmatic features in schizophrenia: a machine learning approach.

An impairment in pragmatic communication is a core feature of schizophrenia, often associated with difficulties in social interactions. The pragmatic deficits regard various pragmatic phenomena, e.g.

Neural-level associations of non-verbal pragmatic comprehension in young Finnish autistic adults.

This video-based study examines the pragmatic non-verbal comprehension skills and corresponding neural-level findings in young Finnish autistic adults, and controls. Items from the Assessment Battery of Communication (ABaCo) were chosen to evaluate the comprehension of non-verbal communication. Inter-subject correlation (ISC) analysis of the functional magnetic resonance imaging data was used to reveal the synchrony of brain activation across participants during the viewing of pragmatically complex scenes of ABaCo videos.

Pragmatics, Theory of Mind and executive functions in schizophrenia: Disentangling the puzzle using machine learning.

Objective: Schizophrenia is associated with a severe impairment in the communicative-pragmatic domain. Recent research has tried to disentangle the relationship between communicative impairment and other domains usually impaired in schizophrenia, i.e.

Why Pragmatics and Theory of Mind Do Not (Completely) Overlap.

Aim of the paper is to discuss the extent to which pragmatics, i.e., the ability to use language and other expressive means to convey meaning in a specific interactional context, overlaps with Theory of Mind (ToM), i.

Cognitive Pragmatic Rehabilitation Program in Schizophrenia: A Single Case fMRI Study.

The present study was intended to evaluate the effects of a rehabilitative training, the Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment (CPT), aimed at improving communicative-pragmatic abilities and the related cognitive components, on the cerebral modifications of a single case patient diagnosed with schizophrenia. The patient underwent two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) sessions, before and after the treatment. In order to assess brain changes, we calculated the Amplitude of Low Frequency Fluctuation (ALFF) index of the resting-state fMRI signal, which is interpreted as reflecting the intensity of the spontaneous regional activity of the brain.

Sincere, Deceitful, and Ironic Communicative Acts and the Role of the Theory of Mind in Childhood.

The aim of the study is to investigate the relationship among age, first- and second-order Theory of Mind and the increasing ability of children to understand and produce different kinds of communicative acts - sincere, ironic, and deceitful communicative acts - expressed through linguistic and extralinguistic expressive means. To communicate means to modify an interlocutor's mental states (Grice, 1989), and pragmatics studies the inferential processes that are necessary to fill the gap, which often exists in human communication, between the literal meaning of a speaker's utterance and what the speaker intends to communicate to the interlocutor. We administered brief video-clip stories showing different kinds of pragmatic phenomena - sincere, ironic, and deceitful communicative acts - and first- and second-order ToM tasks, to 120 children, ranging in age from 3 to 8 years.

Psychometric Properties of the Theory of Mind Assessment Scale in a Sample of Adolescents and Adults.

This research aimed at the evaluation of the psychometric properties of the Theory of Mind Assessment Scale (Th.o.m.

Rehabilitation of Communicative Abilities in Patients with a History of TBI: Behavioral Improvements and Cerebral Changes in Resting-State Activity.

A targeted training program for the rehabilitation of communicative abilities-Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment (CPT)-has been developed and previously tested on a sample of patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI), whose performance was found to have improved. Since cortical plasticity has been recognized as the main mechanism of functional recovery, we investigated whether and how behavioral improvements following the training program are accompanied by brain modifications. Eight TBI patients took part in the training program and were behaviorally assessed pre- and post-treatment; six of these patients were also evaluated with pre- and post-treatment resting state (rs) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Communicative-Pragmatic Treatment in Schizophrenia: A Pilot Study.

This paper aims to verify the efficacy of Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment (CPT), a new remediation training for the improvement of the communicative-pragmatic abilities, in patients with schizophrenia. The CPT program is made up of 20 group sessions, focused on a number of communication modalities, i.e.

"No more a child, not yet an adult": studying social cognition in adolescence.

There are several reasons why adolescence is interesting. It is in this phase that an individual finds herself fully facing the external world: basically equipped with the kind of social cognition that s/he has acquired at home, at school and through the media during childhood, s/he has now to meet a host of other, diverse views of what "reasonable," "appropriate," or "expected" courses of thought and emotions are, in the wild with friends and peers, romantic or sexual partners, teachers and employers, and the society at large. Furthermore, she is also expected, both at home and in the external world, to have a wholly new degree of control over such courses.

Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment: A Rehabilitative Program for Traumatic Brain Injury Individuals.

Objective: To verify the efficacy of Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment (CPT), a new rehabilitation training program for improving communicative-pragmatic abilities.

Design: The CPT program consists of 24 group sessions, concerned with improving several communication modalities, theory of mind (ToM), and cognitive components that can affect pragmatic performance, such as awareness and executive functions.

Participants: A sample of 15 adults with severe traumatic brain injury.

A broad assessment of theory of mind in adolescence: the complexity of mindreading.

The aim of this research was to provide an articulated assessment of several different ToM components, namely first- vs. third-person, egocentric vs. allocentric, and first- vs.

Assessment battery for communication (ABaCo): normative data.

The Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo) was introduced to evaluate pragmatic abilities in patients with cerebral lesions. The battery is organized into five evaluation scales focusing on separate components of pragmatic competence. In the present study, we present normative data for individuals 15-75 years of age (N = 300).