Intuitive psychological, physical and biological knowledge in typically developing preschoolers, children with autism and children with Down's syndrome

Abstract

This study investigated intuitive concepts of biology, physics and psychology in typical preschoolers ( N = 23), children with autism ( N = 20) and children with Down's syndrome (DS; N = 18). Three tasks from Peterson and Siegal (1997) (false belief (Baron‐Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985), false photo (Zaitchik, 1990) and innate potential (Gelman & Wellman, 1991)) were employed. A further three tasks (perception (Slaughter & Gopnik, 1996), balance (Siegler, 1976) and illness (Kalish, 1998)) were included to gain insight into the similarities and differences in understanding across groups of children and within each domain. Preschoolers performed well on both the intuitive psychology tasks, children with autism performed poorly on these tasks, and children with DS performed well on the perception task but poorly on the false belief task. By contrast, performance on the physics and biology tasks was not significantly different across groups. These findings support the argument that cognitive development is domain‐specific and highlight the need for further research in this area.