In 1978 Premack and Woodruff published a research paper that asked whether a chimpanzee could imagine what someone else was thinking and use this information to alter its behaviour. They called this ability to impute mental states to the self and to others “Theory of Mind.”
In 1985 Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith suggested that autistic children have difficulties with theory of mind including undertaking tasks that require the child to understand another person's beliefs.
In 1995 Ozonoff and Miller published the first study of a mind reading training programme for autistic children.