developmental psychologist have used a procedure called the false belief task to examine childrens
Theory of mind Individuals with the diagnosis of schizophrenia can show deficits in theory of mind. Mirjam Sprong and colleagues investigated the impairment by examining 29 different studies, with a total of over 1500 participants.[63] This meta-analysis showed significant and stable deficit of theory of mind in people with schizophrenia. They performed poorly on false-belief tasks, which test the ability to understand that others can hold false beliefs about events in the world, and also on intention-inference tasks, which assess the ability to infer a character's intention from reading a short story. Schizophrenia patients with negative symptoms, such as lack of emotion, motivation, or speech, have the most impairment in theory of mind and are unable to represent the mental states of themselves and of others. Paranoid schizophrenic patients also perform poorly because they have difficulty accurately interpreting others' intentions. The meta-analysis additionally showed that IQ, gender, and age of the participants does not significantly affect the performance of theory of mind tasks.[63]