British Journal of Developmental Psychology · 1988 · 596 citations · 0 references
EducationHuman DevelopmentPsychologyChild DevelopmentCognitive DevelopmentDevelopmental PsychologyCognitive ImpairmentDevelopmental DelayLanguage DisordersLanguage ImpairmentNeurodevelopmental DisordersTheory Of MindChild Language DisordersExpressive Language DelayFalse Belief MemoryLanguage Impairment PatternsMind Perception In ChildrenSocial Cognition DeficitsTheory Of Mind DeficitsTheory Of Mind Impairment
The study investigates whether autistic children exhibit a severe, specific deficit in mental state understanding due to impaired meta‑representational capacity that hampers theory‑of‑mind construction. Autistic children with a mental age of 7 fail theory‑of‑mind tasks normally mastered by 3‑ to 4‑year‑olds, showing delayed false‑belief and limited‑knowledge understanding, and these deficits are not attributable to seeing, memory, or language impairments.
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’.