Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T17:05:23.189Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Autistic children understand seeing and wanting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

Jacinta Tan  and
Paul L. Harris
Jacinta Tan
Affiliation:
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford
Paul L. Harris
Affiliation:
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Autistic children were assessed for their understanding of seeing and wanting. In Experiment 1, they judged whether a target was visible to each of two observers (a Level 1 task of visual perspective-taking) and which of two targets each observer would identify as “in front” (a Level 2 task). The autistic children performed as well as normal children of the same verbal mental age on both tasks. In Experiment 2, autistic children identified the emotion that familiar situations would elicit, expressed a selective preference or desire, and reidentified that desire despite an outcome that thwarted it. Their performance was similar to that of normal and retarded children equated for verbal mental age. An explanation is offered for autistic children's difficulty on some psychological tasks and their relative success on others.

Type
Research Article
Information
Development and Psychopathology , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , April 1991 , pp. 163 - 174
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

American Psychiatric Association. (1987). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, rev. 3rd ed. (DSM-IIIR). Washington DC: Author.Google Scholar
Astington, J. W., & Gopnik, A. (1990). Developing understanding of desire and intention. In Whiten, A. (Ed.), Natural theories of mind. Oxford: Black well.Google Scholar
Astington, J. W., Harris, P. L., & Olson, D. R. (1988). Developing theories of mind. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Baron-Cohen, S. (1987). Autism and symbolic play. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 5, 139–148.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baron-Cohen, S (1989a). Perceptual role-taking and proto-declarative pointing in autism. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 7, 113–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baron-Cohen, S. (1989b). Are autistic children ‘Behaviourists’? An examination of their mental-physical and appearance-reality distinctions. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 19, 579–599.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baron-Cohen, S. (1989c). The autistic child's theory of mind: A case of specific developmental delay. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 30, 285–297.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Baron-Cohen, S. (in press-a). Do people with autism understand what causes emotion? Child Development.Google Scholar
Baron-Cohen, S. (in press-b). The development of a theory of mind in autism: Deviance or delay? In Konstantareas, M. & Beitchman, J. (Eds.), Psychiatric Clinics of North America, Special issue on Pervasive Developmental Disorders. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders.Google Scholar
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a theory of mind? Cognition, 21, 37–46.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1986). Mechanical, behavioural and intentional understanding of picture stories in autistic children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 4, 113–125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brentano, F. (1874/1973). Psychology from an empirical standpoint. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Flavell, J.. (1988). The development of children's knowledge about the appearance-reality distinction. American Psychologist, 41, 418–425.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flavell, J. H., Everett, B. A., Croft, K., & Flavell, E. R. (1981). Young children's knowledge about visual perception: Further evidence for the Level 1–Level 2 distinction. Developmental Psychology, 17, 99–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gopnik, A., & Astington, J. (1988). Children's under-standing of representational change and its relation to the understanding of false-belief and the appearance-reality distinction. Child Development, 59, 26–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, P. L. (1989). Children and emotion: The development of psychological understanding. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Harris, P. L. (1990). The work of the imagination. In Whiten, A. (Ed.), Natural theories of mind. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Harris, P. L., & Gross, D. (1988). Children's under-standing of real and apparent emotion. In Astington, J. W., Harris, P. L., & Olson, D. R. (Eds.), Developing theories of mind. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Harris, P. L., Johnson, C. N., Hutton, D., Andrews, G., & Cooke, T. (1989). Young children's theory of mind and emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 3, 379–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hobson, P. R. (1984). Early childhood autism and the question of egocentrism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 74, 85–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hogrefe, G., Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1986). Ignorance versus false belief: A developmental lag in attribution of epistemic states. Child Development, 57, 567–582.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuczaj, S. A., & Maratsos, M. P. (1975). On the acquisition of front, back and side. Child Development, 46, 202–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leekam, S., & Perner, J. Does the autistic child have a metarepresentational deficit? Submitted for publication.Google Scholar
Leslie, A. M. (1987). Pretense and representation: The origins of “theory of mind.” Psychological Re-view, 94, 412–426.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1988). Autistic children's understanding of seeing, knowing and believing. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 6, 315–324.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1990). Prospects for a cognitive neuropsychology of autism. Psychological Review, 97, 122–131.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Leslie, A. M., & Thaiss, L. Domain specificity in conceptual development: Evidence from autism. Submitted for publication.Google Scholar
Ozonoff, S., Pennington, B. F., & Rogers, S. J. (1990). Are there emotion perception deficits in young autistic children? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 31, 343–361.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Perner, J. (1988). Higher-order beliefs and intentions in children's understanding of social interaction. In Astington, J. W., Harris, P. L., & Olson, D. R. (Eds.), Developing theories of mind. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Perner, J., Leekam, S., & Wimmer, H. (1987). Three-year-olds' difficulty in understanding false belief: Cognitive limitation, lack of knowledge, or pragmatic misunderstanding? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 5, 125–137.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pratt, C., & Bryant, P. E. (1990). Young children understand that seeing leads to knowing (so long as they are looking into a single barrel). Child Development, 61, 973–982.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Russell, J., Mauthner, N., Sharpe, S., & Tidswell, T. (in press). The ‘Windows’ task as a measure of strategic deception in preschoolers and autistic children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology.Google Scholar
Tager-Flusberg, H. (1990). A longitudinal study of the use of mental state terms by autistic children. Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
Wellman, H. M., & Bartsch, K. (1988). Young children's reasoning about beliefs. Cognition, 30, 239–277.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wellman, H. M., & Estes, D. (1986). Early under-standing of mental entities: A reexamination of childhood realism. Child Development, 57, 910–923.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representations and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception. Cognition, 13, 103–128.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Yuill, N. (1984). Young children's coordination of motive and outcome in judgements of satisfaction and morality. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 2, 73–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar