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Autistic children's understanding of seeing, knowing and believing
Author(s) -
Leslie Alan M.,
Frith Uta
Publication year - 1988
Publication title -
british journal of developmental psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.062
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 2044-835X
pISSN - 0261-510X
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-835x.1988.tb01104.x
Subject(s) - psychology , theory of mind , developmental psychology , cognition , mental representation , autism , cognitive psychology , psychiatry
In this study we establish that autistic children have severe and specific difficulty with understanding mental states. Even with a mental age of 7 years, these children mostly fail in tasks which are normally passed around age 3 and 4. We confirm previous results on the poor understanding of false belief but also find that autistic children's grasp of the notion of limited knowledge is grossly delayed. We rule out various other explanations for these results and further show that the autistic child's performance is not limited by failure to understand the causal notion of seeing . Likewise, memory failure cannot be blamed. Language delay can be ruled out as a cause of failure since a group of children with specific language impairment, matched for verbal mental age, performed at ceiling. We propose that autistic children are specifically impaired in their meta‐representational capacity and that this impedes their construction of a ‘theory of mind’.