Abstract

DUTRA, Tarcísio Gomes; OLIVEIRA ANGELO, Rita di Cássia de  and  FERNANDES VIDAL, Cláudio Henrique. Theory of mind in dementias. Rev. SBPH [online]. 2012, vol.15, n.2, pp. 117-127. ISSN 1516-0858.

Theory of Mind (ToM) concerns to ability to infer mental states to himself and others, in order to understand and foretell behaviors. Aspects of ToM in diseases like autism and schizophrenia are already established in literature, however their behaviors in dementia, especially the cortical, has been scarcely addressed. These, on the order hand, are characterized by deficits in several cognitive fields, with damage to the life of the relationship of these individuals. The aim of this study was to go along a brief review of the literature concerning the subject and discuss some of their findings. Procedure was a literature review using the MEDLINE, LILACS, PORTAL CAPES and SCIELO. The key words used in English and Portuguese, respectively, were: Theory of Mind, Theory of Mind and Dementia, the criteria were year of publication (from 2000) and relevance of the topic. We found and described 4 articles involved in the proposed subject, as well as articles that relate the findings to neural bases circumscribed. The literature associates changes in ToM to dementia, with particular depending on the type and neural substrate involved. Accordingly the frontal variant frontotemporal dementia, appears to be the prototype of this condition, knowing, however, that several brain areas are involved and interconnected in the processing of ToM.

Keywords : Theory of mind; Theory of mind; Dementia.

        · abstract in Portuguese     · text in Portuguese     · Portuguese ( pdf )