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Alan Leslie

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Who they are

Alan M. Leslie is a cognitive scientist and professor at Rutgers University’s Center for Cognitive Science (formerly at the University of London). He is the least publicly visible of the Baron-Cohen/Leslie/Frith trio behind the 1985 Sally-Anne study, but he is arguably the one who provided the deepest theoretical architecture. Where Baron-Cohen popularised Theory of Mind and Frith proposed Central Coherence, Leslie supplied the computational machinery: the theory of metarepresentation and the Theory of Mind Module (ToMM).

Leslie is not autistic. His primary research interest is in how the human mind represents other minds — a question that extends well beyond autism into developmental psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive architecture.

Key contributions

Metarepresentation and pretend play

Leslie’s most original contribution is the theory that the capacity for pretend play and the capacity to understand other people’s beliefs share a common cognitive mechanism: metarepresentation — the ability to form representations of representations. When a child pretends a banana is a telephone, they must hold two representations simultaneously: the real object (banana) and the pretended object (telephone), without confusing them. Leslie proposed that this “decoupling” mechanism is the same one used to represent what another person believes (which may differ from reality).

This insight connected two apparently unrelated observations about autistic children: that they show reduced pretend play and that they fail false-belief tasks. In Leslie’s account, both follow from the same underlying difference in metarepresentational capacity.

The Theory of Mind Module (ToMM)

Leslie formalised the metarepresentation idea into a modular, innate cognitive mechanism — the Theory of Mind Module — that he proposed develops in typical children around 18–24 months (enabling pretend play) and matures into full belief-desire reasoning around age 4 (enabling false-belief understanding). In autism, Leslie proposed, this module is selectively impaired while other cognitive capacities remain relatively intact.

The 1985 collaboration

Leslie was a co-author on Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith (1985), “Does the autistic child have a ‘theory of mind’?” — the study that demonstrated autistic children’s difficulty with the Sally-Anne false-belief task and launched Theory of Mind as the dominant cognitive account of autism. Leslie’s theoretical contribution to the paper was the metarepresentation framework that gave the empirical finding its explanatory teeth.

Critical assessment

The modular claim is contested

Leslie’s strongest theoretical claim — that Theory of Mind depends on a dedicated, innate, domain-specific cognitive module — has been challenged on multiple fronts. Domain-general accounts argue that false-belief understanding emerges from general executive-function capacities (working memory, inhibitory control) rather than from a specialised module. The evidence is mixed, and the modularity question remains open in cognitive science more broadly.

Subsequent research has shown that the relationship between pretend play and Theory of Mind in autism is less clean than the 1985 framework suggested. Some autistic children do engage in pretend play (especially when scaffolded), and some who pass false-belief tasks still show social-communicative differences. The metarepresentation theory elegantly unifies two phenomena, but the phenomena may be less tightly coupled than the theory requires.

Less visible, less critiqued

Leslie’s relative obscurity compared to Baron-Cohen and Frith means his ideas have received less sustained critical engagement from the neurodiversity movement. The critiques of Theory of Mind — the Double Empathy Problem, the conflation of cognitive and affective empathy, the deficit framing — apply to the 1985 framework in which Leslie was a co-architect, but they tend to be directed at Baron-Cohen’s later elaborations rather than at Leslie’s metarepresentation theory specifically. This may mean his contributions are under-credited in both directions: less praised and less challenged.

Predictive processing offers a different level of description

Leslie’s ToMM is a cognitive-level theory. The predictive processing framework operates at the computational level and can potentially explain the same phenomena (failure to predict others’ beliefs, reduced pretend play) through aberrant precision weighting rather than modular impairment. The two accounts are not necessarily incompatible — a metarepresentational module could be the thing that implements hierarchical prediction in the social domain — but predictive processing is currently attracting more research attention.

Selected works

  • Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A.M., & Frith, U. (1985). “Does the autistic child have a ‘theory of mind’?” Cognition, 21(1), 37–46. — The foundational study.
  • Leslie, A.M. (1987). “Pretense and representation: the origins of ‘theory of mind.‘” Psychological Review, 94(4), 412–426. — The theoretical paper laying out the metarepresentation framework.
  • Leslie, A.M. (1992). “Pretense, autism, and the theory-of-mind module.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1(1), 18–21. — Accessible summary of the ToMM.
  • Leslie, A.M. (1994). “Pretending and believing: issues in the theory of ToMM.” Cognition, 50(1–3), 211–238. — Extended treatment addressing objections.

Last reviewed

2026-04-12. Leslie is still at Rutgers but publishes less frequently on autism specifically than in earlier decades.

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