Correspondencia

Abstract

The Author’s Reply – Dear Editor, we would like to thank Caixeta for his valuable commentary on our article. Our first aim was to analyse the complex function of mind reading in its essential components in order to verify which one could be disrupted in patients with frontal lesion. The best way we found to do it was taking into account the developmental aspects of theory of mind (ToM) in children from its first prototypical aspect (e.g., joint attention) to a fully mature ToM capacity as the comprehension of “double bluff”. Thus, some of our ToM tasks had been more sensitive to children in early infancy while others had been largely used in studies of adult subjects1-3. As regards mirror test, we agree with Caixeta that more extensive lesion could be necessary to produce mirror sign. In fact, we also tested patients with massive bilateral frontal lesion, which could present mirror sign. Finally, we also agree that ToM deficits would be easier to find in patients with disturbance of social behaviour, as reported in our article. However, the interesting point here could be why we found some patients with extensive medial orbitofrontal lesion without abnormal social behaviour and related ToM impairments, as also found by other authors4.