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Consciousness and Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog

Representing metarepresentations: Is there Theory of Mind-specific cognition? Marc Egeth a,*, Robert Kurzban b a b

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Department of Radiology & Center for Autism Research, 34th Street and Civic Center Blvd, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA University of Pennsylvania, Department of Psychology, USA

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 8 April 2008 Available online xxxx

Keywords: Theory of mind Social Metarepresentation Meta Representation Representational Autism Metacognition Module Evolution

a b s t r a c t What cognitive mechanisms underlie Theory of Mind? Some infer domain-specific Theory of Mind cognition based the pattern of children diagnosed with autism failing the False Belief test but passing the False Photograph test. However, we argue that the False Belief test entails various task demands the False Photograph task does not, including the necessity to represent a higher-order representation (a metarepresentation), thus confounding the inference of domain-specificity. Instead, a general difficulty that affects representations of metarepresentations might account for the seeming domain-specific failure. Here we find that False-Belief failing False-Photograph passing children fail the Meta Photograph test, a new photograph-domain test that requires subjects to represent a metarepresentation. We conclude that people who fail the False Belief test but pass the False Photograph test do not necessarily have a content-specific Theory of Mind deficit. Instead, the general ability to represent representations and metarepresentations might underlie Theory of Mind. Ó 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction People remember what they have seen, and people think about what other people think (about what yet other people think): higher-level representations, or metarepresentations, are ubiquitous in mental life, and the cognitive ability to represent metarepresentations is essential to understanding our own and other people’s psychology. A prominent theory holds that we think about mental states by means of a domain-specific ‘‘Theory of Mind Module,” a dissociable piece of cognition that specifically represents mental representations like beliefs, but not non-mental representations like photographs or logical propositions (Leslie, 1994). The theory of a Theory of Mind Module is opposed to the theory that representations of both mental and non-mental representations are created by the same cognitive processes (e.g. Zaitchik, 1990). Here, we question the inference that evidence from patient populations and neuroimaging supports a Theory of Mind Module in human psychology, and we suggest instead that the general ability to represent representations and metarepresentations underlies the human ability to understand our own and others’ minds. The primary evidence for the representation of minds by Theory of Mind-specific cognition comes from two findings based on the False Belief and ‘‘False” Photograph tests1. First, children diagnosed with autism fail the False Belief test, which requires subjects to represent mental representations, but they pass the ‘‘False” Photograph test, which requires subjects to * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Egeth). 1 ‘‘False” is in quotes following Zaitchik’s (1990) original nomenclature in respect of the fact that out-of-date beliefs and photographs are ‘‘false” in different ways. 1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2008.07.005

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represent non-mental representations (Leekam & Perner, 1991; Leslie & Thaiss, 1992). Second, the brains of healthy adults show more activation in the temporo-parietal junction during the False Belief test compared to the ‘‘False” Photograph test (Saxe & Kanwisher, 2003). In the False Belief and ‘‘False” Photograph tests, an object is changed after a character leaves the room or a Polaroid camera takes a picture (respectively), and to pass the test, subjects must demonstrate that they understand that the representation in question, either the character’s memory or the Polaroid photograph, does not track the change. Because both tests require subjects to represent representations, but only the False Belief test includes mental representations, some reason that selective False Belief failure in autism implies a content-specific Theory of Mind deficit in autism and an intact content-specific Theory of Mind module in typical development and, furthermore, that brain activation differences during these two tasks indicates a physical location for the module (e.g. Baron-Cohen, 1995; Leslie, 1994; Saxe & Kanwisher, 2003). However, a closer examination of the False Belief and ‘‘False” Photograph tests reveals that to represent the mental representations in the False Belief test entails more cognitive demands than to represent the non-mental representations in the ‘‘False” Photograph test, meaning that selective False Belief test failure might be due either to the mental-state content of the False Belief test or to the higher demands of the False Belief test. Some such demands others have identified include working memory load (Davis & Pratt, 1995; Gordon & Olson, 1998), the need to resist interference from reality (Apperly, Samson, & Humphreys, 2005), the need to reconcile a conflict between one’s own beliefs and a character’s beliefs (Russell, Saltmarsh, & Hill, 1999), the lack of straightforwardness of the causal history of the belief representation (Muller, Zelazo, & Imrisek, 2005), and the need to update beliefs versus the fixedness of photographs (Sabbagh, Moses, & Shiverick, 2006). As we explain below, the lack of parallel task demands between the False Belief and ‘‘False” Photograph tests was intended by the creator of the ‘‘False” photograph test (Zaitchik, 1990), but makes these tests inappropriate to use to infer a domain-specific Theory of Mind deficit. Later, we identify an additional key task demand difference: the False Belief test might entail more levels of representation than the ‘‘False” Photograph test. Zaitchik (1990) originally found that typically developing children who fail the False Belief test also fail the ‘‘False” Photograph test, concluding that the ability to represent domain-general representations might underlie belief representations. The association on test performance observed by Zaitchik (1990) suggests that domain-general cognition represents mentalstate representations, even though—especially because—various task demand differences make the False Belief test more demanding. In comparing the two tests, Zaitchik (1990) states, Perception, after all, is a complicated process; it does not occur in a discrete moment and it rarely calls attention to itself. The representations it engenders—beliefs—are immaterial and abstract. In the case of the photograph, however, it’s hard to see the same argument being made; in this condition, the process of fixing the representation, focusing on an object and pushing the button, has none of the complexity of perception. Unlike the mind, the operation of the camera is behaviorally salient and temporally discrete. Furthermore, the representations themselves, the photographs, can be seen and handled... Consider the photographs themselves; none of the properties of beliefs which have been taken to cause the child’s problems apply to the photos. Photos are not immaterial, they are not intangible, they are not private and internal . . . nevertheless, [children] fail. (p. 62). Because the ‘‘False” Photograph test is less demanding, the conclusion becomes clearer that failure on both it and on the False Belief test is due to the requirement for subjects to represent a representation per se rather than any of the other cognitively demanding difficulties associated with the False Belief test. However, selective failure on the False Belief test—a dissociation in test performance—would not indicate a Theory of Mind-specific deficit because failure might be due to any of the extra demands of the False Belief test. Therefore, contra Leslie and Thaiss (1992), we conclude that we do not know if False-Belief failing ‘‘False” Photograph-passing children have a domain-specific Theory of Mind deficit: they might, or they might just as well have a deficit that affects their ability to process any of the domain-general task demands inherent to the False Belief test that Zaitchik (1990) intentionally left out of the ‘‘False” Photograph test. The inherent domain-general task demand differences between tests are especially problematic in the study of possible domain-specific deficits in autism, which is known to include domain-general executive deficits (e.g. Perner & Lang, 1999): children diagnosed with autism would be expected to have less success with the more demanding test (the False Belief test) separate from any question of a domain-specific deficit (see Stone & Gerrans, 2006a, 2006b). Even children diagnosed with autism who fail the False Belief test can typically represent some Theory of Mind representations, such as other people’s perception (e.g. Baron-Cohen & Goodhart, 1994; Hobson, 1984). Premack and Woodruff (1978) define a Theory of Mind as that which separates mentalists from behaviorists, the term applying equally to mentalizing academics’ explicit theories about mental states and mentalizing chimpanzees’ implicit theories that guide their behavior with respect to predicting others’ behavior (their devious proposition is that behavorist theories cannot fully explain chimpanzee psychology if the chimpanzees themselves are mentalists!) A behaviorist has no more use for what a person sees than for what a person knows, so, if children diagnosed with autism represent other people’s perceptions, then they have Theories of Mind. By design, passing the False Belief test requires a Theory of Mind (Wimmer & Perner, 1983), but failing the test does not rule out a Theory of Mind.

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Likewise, passing the ‘‘False” Photograph test does not rule out a domain-general deficit that affects the ability to represent representations. The Polaroid photographs in the ‘‘False” Photograph test are, by elegant experimental design, as undemanding non-mental-state representations as possible, as Zaitchik (1990) was exploring the theory that the mere requirement to represent a representation would cause some individuals to fail a test. Any representational deficit that does not entirely eradicate the ability to represent all representations might preserve ‘‘False” Photograph performance. A domaingeneral representational deficit might let a subject understand the first-order photograph representations in the ‘‘False” Photograph test but fail to understand the more difficult belief representations in the False Belief test. Below, we argue that beliefs in the False Belief test might be higher-order representations than photographs in the ‘‘False” Photograph test; if so, False-Belief failing ‘‘False” Photograph passers could just as well have a domain-general representational deficit as a Theory of Mind-specific deficit. The content of a characters’ belief in the False Belief test is based on the content of that character’s prior perception, making the belief a higher-level representation than the perception. Zaitchik (1990) notes that the False Belief test requires subjects to represent complex perceptual processes as well as subsequent post-perceptual belief representations. Dawkins (1986, p. 15) and Sekular and Blake (1985, p. 35) point out the striking analogy between the photographic representations created by cameras and the visual perception of eyes: both have a lens, retina/film, and a resulting image/percept that reflects the visual information in a scene. Photographs are long-lasting like beliefs, but as far as representational complexity, nothing in the photographs of the ‘‘False” Photograph test goes beyond the analogy of visual perception and seeing, whereas in the False Belief test, the contents of characters’ beliefs are based on what those characters previously saw, making these beliefs higher-order representations (metarepresentations). If the False Belief test entails more or higher-level representations than the ‘‘False” Photograph test, then the degree of a domain-general representation deficit, rather than the type of deficit, might account for the difference between a False-Belief failing ‘‘False” Photograph failure and a False-Belief failing ‘‘False” Photograph passer. An individual who has trouble representing metarepresentations might be unable to understand higher-order photographs, meta-sentences, post-perceptual beliefs, and a wide range of higher-order social communication such as common knowledge (ego knowing that other knows that ego knows that other knows, etc. [Schelling, 1960]), human contact, eye contact, and joint attention (ego representing other representing ego, etc). Self-knowledge and self-awareness might also be impaired, which some models predict would lead to decreased empathy (e.g. Gallup, 1998). Self-referential statements entail metarepresentations, and while some are confined to logic and math, they are also common in social communication: for example, any time a speaker uses the word ‘‘I,” the listener must represent that the entity which is doing the referring (‘‘I”) is the same as the entity which is being referred to (also ‘‘I”; see Hofstadter, 1979; Legrand, 2007; and Zahavi, 2007). There are multiple lines of evidence that point to a deficit in representing metarepresentation in autism. Children diagnosed with autism who pass the False Belief test, unlike children diagnosed with Down Syndrome who pass the False Belief test, go on to fail a meta-belief test (beliefs about beliefs, Baron-Cohen, 1989). Autism includes abnormal self-referential cognition including self-recognition (Dawson & McKissick, 1984) and self-related memory (Klein, Chan, & Loftus, 1999; Millward, Powell, Messer, & Jordan, 2000). Children diagnosed with autism fare worse on tests of irony than tests of metaphor; both are forms of non-literal language, but only irony requires representing metarepresentations (Happé, 1995). Diagnosed children also show poor communication, which requires establishing common knowledge (which, in turn, entails representing metarepresentations [Sperber & Wilson, 1986]), as well as poor joint attention and eye contact (e.g. Neumann, Spezio, Piven, & Adolphs, 2006), other instances where individuals must represent other individuals who are in turn representing representations. In addition, Neibauer and Garvey (2004) link poor understanding of Godel’s logical paradox and Escher’s self-referential prints, both examples of non-mental-state metarepresentations, to a small corpus callosum, a prominent feature of brains of children diagnosed with autism (Hughes, 2007). Autistic children seem to know that ‘‘cookie” means cookie and ‘‘broccoli” means broccoli, and that one cannot eat the word ‘‘cake:” they have a basic understanding of reference, representation, and language use. But, they have more difficulty with the self-referential statement that ‘‘I” want a cookie. Children with autism, like typically developing precocious talkers, make ‘‘I” vs. ‘‘you” pronoun reversals (Szatmari, Bartolucci, & Bremner, 1989). Language and representation is not the problem here, but higher-order language and metarepresentation might be. In this vein, Tager-Flusberg and Joseph (2005) find that understanding recursive embedded sentences predicts False Belief success. Similarly, Zelazo, Jacques, Burack, and Frye (2002) find that False-Belief failure in autism is associated with failure to understand higher-order rules (rules about rules) that have nothing to do with mental states. The observed dissociation on False Belief and ‘‘False” Photograph task performance in autism but not typical development tells us that some task demand of the False Belief test overlaps with the deficit in autism, whether that demand be the mental content per se or one or more of the representational and non-representational confounds described above. The deficit in autism can tell us something about the cognitive basis of typical human Theory of Mind, as a Theory of Mind deficit (specific or otherwise) is a salient feature of the disorder. Our basic interest is in dissecting the cognitive architecture of Theory of Mind, which turns not on a diagnosis per se but rather on the pattern of performance on the tasks in question. That is, our interest here is not in autism in and of itself, but rather in selective deficits in cognition as indicated by passage and failure on the tasks in question. Autism is an interesting case, but False-Belief failers, especially those who pass the ‘‘False” Photograph test, are generally interesting: do they have a Theory of Mind-specific deficit or a general inability to represent metarepresentations? In this way, probing the cognitive deficit of False-Belief failing ‘‘False” Photograph passers can be very telling for the study of typical development. 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Therefore, in order to determine whether False-Belief failing ‘‘False” Photograph-passers might have a domain-general deficit that affects representations of higher-order representations, we introduce the Meta Photograph test, which requires subjects to represent a photograph of a photograph. We also introduce a non-meta control photograph test, the Strange Blindness test, so-called due to its similarity to change blindness paradigms (Simons & Rensink, 2005), which entails equal or greater task demands as the Meta Photograph test. Our study finds a set of individuals with the cognitive phenotype said to evidence a domain-specific Theory of Mind deficit, namely, False-Belief failing ‘‘False” Photograph passers, and asks this question: Does their deficit extend to higher-level photographs? If so, they have representational deficits that are not specific to the domain of Theory of Mind. If not, then we would be a step closer to establishing that some individuals have a Theory of Mind-specific deficit rather than an inability to process the domain-general task demands of the False Belief test. 2. Materials and methods 2.1. Overall experimental design The Meta Photograph test (Fig. 1) is intended to test the ability to represent higher-level non-mental representations. The essence of the test involves showing subjects a photograph (level 1), a photograph of that photograph (level 2), and a photograph of the photograph of the first photograph (level 3) as part of a test to determine whether subjects are aware of levels of photographic representation (see Fig. 2). To do this, objects are placed into a box (the ‘‘photobox”) and a Polaroid picture is taken of whatever goes into the photobox. After the photograph develops, subjects must then sort new pictures (just-taken) from old pictures (could not have just been taken; the experiment starts with a store of old pictures some of which are shown to the subject). When the first photograph (level 1), taken from the store of old pictures, is placed in the photobox, the only possible resulting new photograph is a photograph of a photograph (level 2). For the sorting task, if subjects sort the

Fig. 1. The experimenter took a photograph of an object (a photograph, (a), for Meta Photograph [MP] and an ice cream scoop, (b), for Strange Blindness [SB]) inside a box (c) and subjects had to sort old photographs to Bunny (d) and new photographs (e for MP, f for SB) to Monkey (g), failing if they gave Monkey any photographs which were impossible to have resulted from having just taken a picture of the object (h, i for MP, j, k for SB: the ball is on the wrong photographic level in (h and i), the ice cream scoop in (j) has a different handle, and (k) shows a salt shaker).

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Fig. 2. Clockwise from upper left: A photograph of a ball (1), a photograph of a photograph of a ball (2), a photograph of a photograph of a photograph of a ball (3), and a meta-photograph that cannot result from taking a photograph of a photograph of a ball (4).

first photograph (level 1) as a new photograph, they are wrong, and if subjects sort the photograph of a photograph of a photograph (level 3) as a new photograph, they are wrong; in either case, they might have failed to keep track of the number of levels of representation in the photograph that resulted from taking a picture of a photograph in the photobox. We include several control conditions to help determine whether failure is due to the meta-levels and not to the complexity of the sorting task. Subjects must first correctly sort several new and old photographs before participating. This sorting ability control retains virtually all the elements of the Meta Photograph test itself: only photographs taken during the session are correctly counted as new photographs, and all other photographs are correctly counted as old photographs. We also include an additional control condition, the Strange Blindness test, so-called due to its similarity to Change Blindness (Simons & Rensink, 2005). Here, an object is placed in the photobox, and after the new photograph develops, one of the photographs that subjects must sort is a photograph of a slightly different object (an ice cream scoop with a handle versus an ice cream scoop without a handle). Egeth (2007) finds that adults fail a paper-and-pencil version of the Strange Blindness test at a higher rate than the Meta Photograph test (see Appendix A), making the Strange Blindness test a stringent control for the Meta Photograph test: if a subject can perform the sorting task and can pass the Strange Blindness test, there is little to make the Meta Photograph test challenging for the subject besides its meta-aspect (requirement to keep track of levels of representation). Particular language demands affect False Belief test failure (see e.g. Silliman et al., 2002), but the present new tasks were designed to have identical language demands. Task demand differences between the sorting control, the Strange Blindness test, and the Meta Photograph test have to do with visual cognition and representational difficulty, not social content or language: we intend selective failure on the Meta Photograph test to identify a domain-general meta–meta-representational deficit (the inability to represent metarepresentations). 2.2. Subjects Thirty-one subjects participated including nineteen children between the ages of four and twelve years old (mean age 7;7), and twelve college students taking Introduction to Psychology (age data not collected). Five children had an autism diagnosis or were characterized as on the autism spectrum (two of whom were siblings), one had an apraxia diagnosis, one had an auditory learning disorder diagnosis, one was described as having ‘‘Sensory Processing Disorder,” five were typically developing four- and five-year-olds, four were typically developing siblings of the above at-risk children, and two were typically developing children aged seven and eleven. As described below, this heterogeneous group of children yielded eight False-Belief failing ‘‘False” Photograph passers, our sample of individuals with the precise cognitive phenotype purported to represent a Theory of Mind-specific deficit. Please cite this article in press as: Egeth, M. & Kurzban, R. Representing metarepresentations: Is there Theory ... Consciousness and Cognition (2008), doi:10.1016/j.concog.2008.07.005

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2.3. Materials The experimental materials consisted of a white box and lid (the photobox, 900  600  1400 ), two stuffed animals (Bunny and Monkey) with photo holders attached (capacity: 35 photos), a Polaroid OneStep SE camera loaded with Polaroid 600 film, extra 600 film, an ice cream scoop without a handle, a three-minute sand timer, a 3  5 standalone lucite photo frame, a red hat, a blue hat, earmuffs, and fourteen previously developed Polaroid photographs (‘‘old photographs”) sitting in Bunny’s photo holder. The fourteen developed photographs that started in Bunny’s photo holder included photographs taken outside the testing environment as well as photographs of items sitting inside the photobox. The photographs from outside the testing environment included scenes of an office, trees, cars, and buildings. The photographs of objects inside the photobox included two photographs of a cup and one photograph each of a comb, tennis ball, salt shaker, and an ice-cream scoop with a handle (the last deliberately looking very much, but not exactly like, a photograph of an ice cream scoop without a handle). Also included were two meta-photographs: a photograph of a tennis ball sitting in front of a photograph of an empty photobox and a photograph of a photograph sitting inside the photobox of a photograph of a tennis ball sitting inside the photobox. The difficulty of parsing the description of this last photograph might hint at the meta-level difficulty of comprehending the structure of the corresponding photographs in Figs. 1 and 2. The photographs of the salt shaker and the ice cream scoop with a handle were trial photographs for the Strange Blindness test, and the two meta-photographs were trial photographs for the Meta Photograph test. These four photographs, along with two of the outdoor photographs, started in the rear of the collection of photographs in Bunny’s photo holder. See Fig. 1 for the initial configuration and samples of photographs and Egeth (2007) for additional details. 2.4. Experimental procedure The Meta Photograph procedure essentially includes a presentation to subjects of an array of photographs including a photograph, a meta-photograph and a meta–meta-photograph to see if subjects recognize the differences and can figure out how each photograph was generated. The control Strange Blindness procedure presents subjects with an array of photographs depicting objects that are not photographs. The experimenter (M.E.) sat across from each child subject with the apparatus facing the subject. Subjects were first asked to name the color of each hat (all subjects were able to do this). The experimenter then pointed to and named each item on the table, including taking a picture and letting the child take a picture with the camera and watch how it developed. The experimenter then showed the child the first six of Bunny’s photographs, saying along with the child what each depicted, but not yet letting the child see the rest of Bunny’s photographs. These six included photographs of outdoor scenes and the photographs of the comb, cup, and tennis ball inside the photobox. The experimenter then conducted the False Belief and False Photograph tests. For the False Belief test, the experimenter took Monkey out of the room, replaced Bunny’s red hat with the blue hat, and asked subjects, ‘‘What does Monkey think Bunny is wearing?” The experimenter then brought Monkey back into the room and asked the child, ‘‘What does Monkey now see that Bunny is wearing?” (All subjects answered this correctly). For the False Photograph test, the experimenter took a picture of Bunny, replaced Bunny’s hat with earmuffs, and asked subjects, ‘‘What will Bunny be wearing in the photograph?” After the photograph developed, the experimenter asked, ‘‘And what is Bunny wearing in the photograph?” (All subjects answered this correctly). This procedure identified eight False-Belief failing ‘‘False” Photograph- passers. After the False Photograph test, the resulting photograph was placed in Monkey’s holder. The experimenter carefully explained that because Bunny already has so many photographs and Monkey doesn’t have any, Monkey would get all the new photographs. Each child was then encouraged take more pictures with the camera, including takeing a picture of the red hat sitting inside the photobox, to see what pictures of objects in the photobox look like. Each child was shown that each photograph takes approximately three minutes to develop, as timed by a sand-timer that the experimenter turned over when the photograph was taken. Monkey continued to get all the new photographs taken by the subjects. For the Meta Photograph test, the experimenter put Bunny’s photograph of a tennis ball in the Lucite photo frame, placed it into the photobox, took a picture of it, and then let the child inspect the contents of the photobox. Subsequently, the experimenter held on to the new photograph, removed all of Monkey’s and Bunny’s photos from their photo holders and turned over the sand timer. After three minutes, the experimenter showed photographs to the child one at a time, asking if each belonged to Bunny or Monkey, and instructing the child to return each photograph to the proper holder. To make sure children understood that Monkey would get all the new photographs while Bunny would keep all of Bunny’s old photographs, the child had to sort at least four photographs correctly, returning two new pictures that had already been in Monkey’s holder to Monkey, one old picture the child had already seen in Bunny’s holder to Bunny, and one old picture of an outdoor scene that the child had never seen before (because it was in the rear half of Bunny’s photographs) to Bunny. The child was then shown the Meta Photograph trial photographs one at a time: the photograph of a tennis ball in front of a photograph of an empty photobox and the photograph of the photograph of the photograph of the tennis ball. Sorting either of these to Monkey was considered failing the Meta Photograph test: either was impossible to have resulted from taking a photograph of a photograph of a tennis ball and, just like the old picture of an outdoor scene that started in the rear half Please cite this article in press as: Egeth, M. & Kurzban, R. Representing metarepresentations: Is there Theory ... Consciousness and Cognition (2008), doi:10.1016/j.concog.2008.07.005

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of Bunny’s photographs, must have belonged to Bunny and not to Monkey. The child was then presented with the (just-taken) photograph of a photograph of a ball in the photobox: sorting this to Bunny would also have been considered failing the Meta Photograph test, but no subjects who correctly sorted the other trial photographs made this error. The Strange Blindness test was counterbalanced in order with the Meta Photograph test. For this test, the experimenter implemented the same procedure as in the Meta Photograph test, except instead of taking a photograph of a photograph, taking a photograph of the ice cream scoop without a handle. The Strange Blindness trial photographs were the photograph of the ice-cream scoop with a handle and the photograph of the salt shaker. Sorting either of these to Monkey was considered failing the Strange Blindness test. Lastly, the child was presented with the (just-taken) picture of the ice cream scoop: sorting this to Bunny would also have been considered failing the Strange Blindness test, but no subjects who correctly sorted the other trial photographs made this error. The twelve college-aged controls participated simultaneously, watching the experimenter conduct the same procedures described above, with the Strange Blindness test first. Subjects wrote their answers for the False Belief and False Photograph tests and, for each photograph, whether it should be sorted to Bunny or Monkey. For both children and adults, any error was considered failing. 3. Results One child did not complete the False Belief test, one child did not complete the False Photograph test, two children failed both the False Belief and ‘‘False” Photograph tests, and two children failed the sorting control test. These individuals are not included in subsequent analyses. All subjects whose data we analyzed passed the color control test (‘‘What color is this hat?”) and the sorting control (correctly sorting old and new pictures to Bunny and Monkey, respectively). Eight children failed the False Belief test and passed the ‘‘False” Photograph test; these are our key subjects. Of these, one failed to complete testing, one passed both the Meta Photograph and Strange Blindness test, one failed both the Meta Photograph and Strange Blindness tests, and five failed the Meta Photograph test while passing the Strange Blindness test. Overall, False-Belief failing ‘‘False” Photograph-passing subjects showed higher failure on the Meta Photograph test than the Strange Blindness test (W = 15, N = 5, p < .05). Five children passed the False Belief and ‘‘False” Photograph tests. Of these, one failed to complete testing, three failed both the Meta Photograph and Strange Blindness tests, and one passed the Meta Photograph test while failing the Strange Blindness test. All twelve undergraduates passed the False Belief and ‘‘False” Photograph tests. Of these, five passed both the Meta Photograph and Strange Blindness tests, three failed both the Meta Photograph and Strange Blindness tests, three passed the Meta Photograph while failing the Strange Blindness test, and one failed the Meta Photograph test while passing the Strange Blindness test. Overall, False-Belief passing subjects failed the Strange Blindness test at a higher rate than the Meta Photograph test (n.s.). All subjects who passed control tests passed the test of others’ perception (‘‘What does Monkey see Bunny is wearing?”). Overall, False-Belief failing ‘‘False” Photograph passers (all children) were more likely than False-Belief passing ‘‘False” Photograph passers (including undergraduates) to fail the Meta Photograph test and pass the Strange Blindness test than vice versa (pass the Meta Photograph test and fail the Strange Blindness test), v[1, N = 10] = 6.66, p < .01 (see Table 1). 4. Discussion Both the False Belief and ‘‘False” Photograph tests require subjects to represent representations; however, not all representations are created equal. A person-counting test that shows subjects a large crowd and a pencil-counting test that shows subjects five pencils both require ‘‘counting,” but one requires more counting than the other, and selective failure would not indicate a person-specific counting deficit. If beliefs in the False Belief test are based on prior perception, and photographs in the ‘‘False” Photograph test are themselves like perception, then the belief representations in the False Belief test are of a higher-order than the photographic representations in the ‘‘False” Photograph test. Because there is no empirical test of the number of levels of representation in a given test, we are ultimately unsure how many representational levels these two tests entail, meaning we must be unsure whether performance dissociation indicates a deficit linked to mental-state content or to representational task-demands. However, using alternate tests, we can independently vary just the representational level within a domain, and, doing so within the domain of photographs, we detected a meta-meta-representational deficit among False Belief test failers—an inability to represent metarepresentations. Table 1 Number of individuals passing and failing Meta Photograph and Strange Blindness tests

Fail FB/Pass FP Pass FB/Pass FP

Pass MP/Fail SB

Fail MP/Pass SB

0 4

5 1

All five subjects in the first row are children; four out of five in the second row are adults, including the individual in the lower-right quadrant. Key. MP, Meta Photograph; FB, False Belief; FP, ‘‘False” Photograph; SB, Strange Blindness.

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False-Belief failing ‘‘False” Photograph-passing children failed the Meta Photograph test at a higher rate than the Strange Blindness test, but we failed to find evidence from other subjects that the Meta Photograph test was ‘‘harder.” The Strange Blindness test is also ‘‘hard,” the difference between photographs f and j in Fig. 1 deliberately being subtle, and aside from the content of the photographs the Strange Blindness test procedure is the same as the Meta Photograph procedure. But, the quality of the difficulty differs between the two tests. It is certainly not the presence of mental-state content that differs between the tests, and we think that for some, the key difficulty of the Meta Photograph test is the requirement to represent a metarepresentation. Perhaps a wider category of individuals than False-Belief failing ‘‘False” Photograph-passing children would tend to fail the Meta Photograph test, but we identify within our current sample an initial set of individuals with a domain-general inability not to metarepresent (represent a representation) but to meta–meta-represent (represent a metarepresentation). Individuals who understand what other people see and how a simple photograph will appear but not what people will remember or how a photograph of a photograph will appear are more parsimoniously characterized as having a domain-general inability to represent metarepresentations than as having a domain-specific inability to represent mental states. Baron-Cohen (1989) finds that children diagnosed with autism who pass the False Belief test go on to fail a meta-belief test, unlike children diagnosed with Down Syndrome who pass even the meta-belief test. Along with the current result, Baron-Cohen’s finding establishes the pattern that when the level of representation is varied within a domain, False-Belief failers including autistic children are selectively poorer at representing higher-level representations. Above, we present a reasonable view that, being based on prior perception, representing beliefs in the False Belief test requires subjects to represent more levels of representation than does representing photographs in the ‘‘False” Photograph test. Therefore, we must conclude that there is no evidence currently supporting a domain-specific Theory of Mind representational deficit in autism. The functional brain activity differences identified by Saxe and Kanwisher (2003) might instead reflect one or more of the numerous task demand differences between the False Belief and ‘‘False” Photograph tests. Given an intact ability to represent other people’s perception, we can say that children diagnosed with autism typically have a Theory of Mind, but they also have a domain-general representational deficit. This view aligns nicely with the thrust of recent work emphasizing domain-general components of Theory of Mind both in autism and typical development, a new body of literature limiting the role, if any, that a hypothetical Theory of Mind Module might play (Apperly, Samson, Chiavarino, Bickerton, & Humphreys, 2007; Apperly et al., 2005; McKinnon & Moscovitch, 2007; Perner & Leekam, 2008; Sabbagh et al., 2006; Stone & Gerrans, 2006a; Stone & Gerrans, 2006b). Some Theory of Mind abilities, based on modules or not, are preserved in autism (see e.g. Hobson, 1984; Silliman et al., 2002), and domain-general deficits impact the performance of children diagnosed with autism on tests of Theory of Mind (e.g. Zelazo et al., 2002). We see a role for domain-general cognition in enabling Theory of Mind as well as domain-general deficits in autism; we see modular components such as gaze following enabling Theory of Mind in typically developing people as well as various intact Theory of Mind abilities in autism. However, we do not see evidence clearly supporting a ‘‘Theory of Mind Module” that represents mental-state (but not non-mental-state) representations. If autism includes preserved Theory of Mind combined with domain-general deficits, then building on preserved Theory of Mind might help give traction to therapeutic techniques: some intact Theory of Mind plus improved general cognitive skills might yield a more complete, higher-order Theory of Mind. The vantage of a Theory of Mind-specific ‘‘mindblindness” (Baron-Cohen, 1995), on the other hand, might continue to yield therapies that focus overmuch on social skills per se rather than the cognitive structures that underlie normal development of these skills, reasoning that if the deficit is specifically social, then there is no need for cognitive practice outside specifically social tasks (see e.g. Williams White, Koenig, & Scahill, 2007). Improving autistic children’s Theory of Mind should be a major clinical goal, and knowing the root of the deficit might help clinicians target weak cognitive skills that lead to the salient and diagnosable deficit in social ability in autism. Of course, caution should be exercised in drawing inferences from our relatively modest sample, and it would be valuable to replicate the present study with additional subjects drawn from broader diagnostic populations. We are currently testing a group of children diagnosed with autism on the paper-and-pencil version of the Meta Photograph procedure (on which Egeth [2007] found undergraduates to succeed at a higher rate than a paper-and-pencil Strange Blindness test; see Appendix A). But, whether or not a domain-general meta-meta-representational deficit turns out to be widespread in autism, we can conclude from the current argument and results that merely failing the False Belief test and passing the ‘‘False” Photograph test does not rule out a representational deficit or require a domain-specific Theory of Mind deficit. Upon seeing both the 2nd- and 3rd-level photographs in the Meta Photograph test, one False-Belief failing child suggested that the camera had made two photographs. Not only did the child fail the Meta Photograph test, but when asked repeatedly and given more time, he could not figure out which was the new photograph, saying, ‘‘I can’t tell”. It might be one thing to think about what another individual sees, but quite another to think about that individual thinking about what you see or what another individual remembers he previously saw. Keeping track of the ‘‘same thing” coexisting on multiple levels of representation—e.g. the cheese, the cheese Mickey sees, the cheese Minnie knows Mickey saw, and the cheese I know you know I know you know I saw—is a natural human ability which, like perception, can be easy to do but reveals itself to be unexpectedly complicated upon analysis. An inability to keep track of levels would lead to a social deficit, even if not an exclusively social deficit, because it is essential for people to engage in such tracking in order to understand and communicate with each other. Clear tests of the theory of Theory of Mind-specific cognition remain to be developed, whereas domain-general theories of Theory of Mind already have converging lines of theoretical and empirical support. We look forward to seeing how the field progresses on these highly tractable open questions about how people think about thinking and how people represent representations and metarepresentations. Please cite this article in press as: Egeth, M. & Kurzban, R. Representing metarepresentations: Is there Theory ... Consciousness and Cognition (2008), doi:10.1016/j.concog.2008.07.005

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Acknowledgments This research formed the basis for some of M.E.’s doctoral dissertation. Thank you to M.E.’s dissertation committee, including Martha Farah and Dan Swingley, as well as the rest of the Psychology Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Also thank you to M.E.’s family, including Howard, Sylvia, and Jill Egeth, and to his girlfriend, fiancé, and now wife, Miriam Steinberg. Appendix A. Paper-and Pencil Meta Photograph and Strange Blindness Tests. 3 pages; each graphic represents one page. Instructions/Page 1.

Paper-and-pencil Strange Blindness condition (page 2 or 3 of experiment, counterbalanced).

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Paper-and-pencil Meta Photograph condition (Page 2 or 3 of experiment, counterbalanced).

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