Sally–Anne test

"[3] In the Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith study of theory of mind in autism, 61 children—20 of whom were diagnosed autistic under established criteria, 14 with Down syndrome and 27 of whom were determined as clinically unimpaired—were tested with "Sally" and "Anne".

[6] Ruffman, Garnham, and Rideout (2001) further investigated links between the Sally–Anne test and autism in terms of eye gaze as a social communicative function.

Tager-Flusberg (2007) states that in spite of the empirical findings with the Sally–Anne task, there is a growing uncertainty among scientists about the importance of the underlying theory-of-mind hypothesis of autism.

[8] Eye tracking of chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans suggests that all three anticipate the false beliefs of a subject in a King Kong suit, and pass the Sally–Anne test.

On March 22, 2023, a research team from Microsoft released a paper showing that the LLM-based AI system GPT-4 could pass an instance of the Sally–Anne test, which the authors interpret as "suggest[ing] that GPT-4 has a very advanced level of theory of mind.

"[14] However, the generality of this finding has been disputed by several other papers, which indicate that GPT-4's ability to reason about the beliefs of other agents remains limited (59% accuracy on the ToMi benchmark),[15] and is not robust to "adversarial" changes to the Sally-Anne test that humans flexibly handle.