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Autistic Children's Knowledge of Thinking and Feeling States in Other People
Author(s) -
Prior Margot,
Dahlstrom Bronwyn,
Squires TracieLee
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
journal of child psychology and psychiatry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.652
H-Index - 211
eISSN - 1469-7610
pISSN - 0021-9630
DOI - 10.1111/j.1469-7610.1990.tb00799.x
Subject(s) - psychology , autism , feeling , theory of mind , comprehension , cognition , developmental psychology , mental age , social cognition , cognitive psychology , consistency (knowledge bases) , developmental disorder , task (project management) , social psychology , linguistics , philosophy , geometry , mathematics , neuroscience , management , economics
Autistic children, pair matched on chronological and verbal mental age with control children, were given Hobson's task of recognition of emotions and Baron‐Cohen's False Belief tasks to assess the replicability of their findings of deficits in understanding of feeling and mental states in autism. There were no group differences on the emotion tasks and performance was related to chronological and verbal mental age. An autism specific deficit was shown in only one of the false belief conditions and again performance was related to verbal comprehension ability. There was some consistency within the group in responses across the two kinds of tasks. Parent reported social behaviour and experience in the autistic children was only weakly related to the ability to pass the tasks. It is argued that the results reflect developmental factors and that claims for an autism specific problem in these kinds of social/cognitive processing may need further exploration.