Improving Theory of Mind in Down syndrome ? An exploratory study

Background To communicate efficiently, it is important to understand the interlocutor’s perspective as well as the interlocutor’s feelings and emotions in a specific situation. These abilities are known to be impaired in DS children. It therefore makes sense to investigate the Theory of mind (ToM) development in this population. In our study, we explore the possibility of improving Down syndrome participants’ ToM abilities; these skills being important for understanding the subtleties of an interpersonal communication situation.
Method DS subjects and typically developing children matched for non-verbal mental age were assessed. before and after a 10-weeks ToM multimodal training session. The pre- and post-test tasks came from the French adaptation of the ToM Inventory.
Results At the end of the 10-weeks training, both trained group perform significantly better on ToM tasks that the untrained groups. Moreover, both trained show higher performances on pot-test than on pre-test whereas untrained groups performances remain stable. The DS trained group tend to perform better after the training session than the untrained typically developing children.
Conclusion Results of our exploratory study are encouraging as they suggest that with a specific training DS children can improve their ToM abilities.