Autistic children's difficulty with mental disengagement from an object: Its implications for theories of autism.

Abstract

Experiment 1 demonstrated that autistic Ss continue to fail a task originally designed as one of strategic deception when there is no opponent present: They perseveratively indicate the target object. We argue that this behavior is better explained in terms of failing to disengage from an object than in terms of a theory-of-mind deficit. To ensure that their difficulties were not due to failure to construe the task in a competitive manner, we ran a 2nd study, on detour reaching. Compared with control Ss, the autistic Ss had great difficulty with the task. We discuss autistic children's difficulties with these 2 tasks in the light of recent evidence that autism is associated with failing executive tasks and argue that viewing the syndrome as an executive deficit has clear advantages