Production of basic emotions by children with congenital blindness: Evidence for the embodiment of theory of mind

Children with congenital blindness are delayed in understanding other people's minds. The present study examined whether this delay was related to a more primitive form of inter-subjectivity by which infants draw correspondence between parental mirroring of the infant's display and proprioceptive sensations. Twenty children with congenital blindness and 20 typically-developing sighted children aged between 4 and 12 years were administered a series of tasks examining false belief and emotion understanding and production. The blind children scored lower on the false belief tasks and did not convey emotions facially to adult observers as accurately as sighted participants. The adults' ratings of the children's expressions were correlated with the children's scores on the false belief tasks. It is suggested that understanding people's minds might be anchored in primitive embodied forms of relatedness.