some thinky thoughts about the Sally Anne test
In case you're wondering what the Sally Anne test is...
For some reason I started thinking about this at work, and realized it was actually a thinly disguised logic/programming problem. This becomes obvious if you represent Sally, Anne, and the location of the marble as variables, and Anne hiding Sally's marble as a function of which the variable "Sally" is out of scope. And then I came to the opinion that if you explained it this way to a bunch of autistic kids, they'd probably get it just fine.
Then I started thinking of other ways in which someone could fail this test other than simply lacking an imagination. I'll use my personal experience to start off with, even though it's highly doubtful I'm on the spectrum and even if I am, it would be just barely. But anyway, I'll just say this, it was quite common in my experience when I was growing up to see that other people seemed to somehow know things, without knowing how they knew them. I can extrapolate from this to the Sally Anne example, because the key question in this problem is how Sally knows what she knows. I would not be surprised if it were also common for autistic kids to also frequently experience other people knowing things without being clear on how they knew, and to also be punished for not knowing things they didn't know they were supposed to know. So the idea that someone could walk away and magically know that their marble had been moved might not seem so strange in that context.
Though to be honest, I probably would have gotten this question right as a child. This might seem like I'm overthinking it, but I've honestly seen very little to convince me that autistic people lack imagination, or are not constantly trying to figure out how other people work.
For some reason I started thinking about this at work, and realized it was actually a thinly disguised logic/programming problem. This becomes obvious if you represent Sally, Anne, and the location of the marble as variables, and Anne hiding Sally's marble as a function of which the variable "Sally" is out of scope. And then I came to the opinion that if you explained it this way to a bunch of autistic kids, they'd probably get it just fine.
Then I started thinking of other ways in which someone could fail this test other than simply lacking an imagination. I'll use my personal experience to start off with, even though it's highly doubtful I'm on the spectrum and even if I am, it would be just barely. But anyway, I'll just say this, it was quite common in my experience when I was growing up to see that other people seemed to somehow know things, without knowing how they knew them. I can extrapolate from this to the Sally Anne example, because the key question in this problem is how Sally knows what she knows. I would not be surprised if it were also common for autistic kids to also frequently experience other people knowing things without being clear on how they knew, and to also be punished for not knowing things they didn't know they were supposed to know. So the idea that someone could walk away and magically know that their marble had been moved might not seem so strange in that context.
Though to be honest, I probably would have gotten this question right as a child. This might seem like I'm overthinking it, but I've honestly seen very little to convince me that autistic people lack imagination, or are not constantly trying to figure out how other people work.