Spontaneous shifts of attention were observed in autistic, typically developing, and nonautistic developmentally delayed infants. Three types of attention shifting behaviour were observed; (1) between an object and another object, (2) between an object and a person, and (3) between a person and another person. The two control groups shifted attention more frequently between an object and a person than between an object and another object or between a person and another person. The infants with autism showed a different pattern, shifting attention between an object and another object more than any other type of shift. Furthermore, infants with autism showed fewer shifts of attention between an object and a person, and between person and person, than did the two control groups. They also spent less time overall looking at people and looked more briefly at people and for longer durations at objects, compared to the two control groups. These results indicate an abnormality in social orientation in autism even at the early age of 20 months.

This study examined the relationship between the development of theory of mind and the development of the belief terms think, know, and guess. Children with autism and Asperger syndrome, matched to children with specific language impairment and normal development, completed false belief, belief term comprehension, and belief term expression tasks. The autistic group's performance on the false belief, belief term comprehension, and belief term expression tasks was significantly poorer than that of the Asperger, language impaired, and normal groups. Across groups an association was found between false belief and belief term performance. Results support a growing body of literature demonstrating links between the development of theory of mind and communicative competence.

The Fear Survey Schedule for Children–II (FSSC–II) (Gullone & King, 1992) was modified for parent report and a younger age group. The modified instrument (FSSC–IIP) was completed by 753 parents of children within the age range 3.0 to 8.9 years. Results revealed a stable eight-factor solution that was sensitive to age and gender differences. Parents reported a higher overall level of fear for school children compared to preschool children, and a higher overall level of fearfulness for girls compared to boys. The most common fears reported were getting lost in a crowd and in a strange place.

Abbreviations: FSSC (–II, –IIP): Fear Survey Schedule for Children; PCA: principal components analysis.

Children's judgements about pain at age 8–10 years were examined comparing two groups of children who had experienced different exposure to nociceptive procedures in the neonatal period: extremely low birthweight (ELBW) [les ]1000 g (N=47) and full birthweight (FBW) [ges ]2500 g (N=37). The 24 pictures that comprise the Pediatric Pain Inventory, depicting events in four settings: medical, recreational, daily living, and psychosocial, were used as the pain stimuli. The subjects rated pain intensity using the Color Analog Scale and pain affect using the Facial Affective Scale. Child IQ and maternal education were statistically adjusted in group comparisons. Pain intensity and pain affect related to activities of daily living and recreation were significantly higher than psychosocial and medically related pain on both scales in both groups of children. Although the two groups of children did not differ overall in their perceptions of pain intensity or affect, the ELBW children rated medical pain intensity significantly higher than psychosocial pain, unlike the FBW group. Also, duration of neonatal intensive care unit stay for the ELBW children was related to increased pain affect ratings in recreational and daily living settings. Despite altered response to pain in the early years reported by parents, on the whole at 8–10 years of age ELBW children judged pain in pictures similarly to their term peers. However, differences were evident, which suggests that studies are needed of biobehavioural reactivity to pain beyond infancy, as well as research into beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions about pain during the course of childhood in formerly ELBW children.

High-functioning adults with autism and control adults were tested on a perceptual learning task that compared discrimination performance on familiar and novel stimuli. Control adults were better able to discriminate familiar than novel stimuli — the perceptual learning effect. No perceptual learning effect was observed in adults with autism although they discriminated the novel stimuli significantly better than control adults. This enhanced discrimination learning about novel, but not familiar, stimuli in autism is discussed in relation to two current hypotheses of information processing in autism — weak central coherence and reduced attention-switching — and a new third hypothesis, which suggests that features held in common between stimuli are processed poorly and features unique to a stimulus are processed well in autism.

I should like to make two comments on the paper of Zucker et al. (1997).

Children with and without autism were compared on two visual search tasks in which a letter target appeared among two sets of letter distracters. In one task, the target shared colour with one set of distracters but was unique in shape — the feature search task. In the other, the conjunctive search task, the target shared colour with one set and shape with another set of distracters. Although search was slower in the conjunctive task than the feature task in normally developing control children, children with autism showed no significant slowing in reaction time in the conjunctive task and were faster than control children in this task. This result is discussed in the light of theories of visual search which state that rate of search is determined by the degree of similarity between target and distracters.

James (1998) had two comments about our recent article on the sibling sex ratio of boys with gender identity disorder (Zucker et al., 1997):

This study measured the sleep attributes of 30 normal 12-month-old children with a computerized movement detector (Actigraph). Data on the child's temperament was based on the Carey Toddler Temperament Questionnaire, which the mother completed. The main finding was that rhythmic children went to sleep earlier and had longer sleep duration; however, their sleep pattern was not more efficient compared to children with irregular rhythmicity. The results of the present study provide only limited evidence to the association between the regulation of sleep-wake cycles and the temperamental characteristics of the child. Hence it may be concluded that within non-referred low-risk infants, temperament does not discriminate between good and poor sleepers. Alternatively, however, the marginal relationship between sleep and temperament demonstrated in the present study may reflect the limitation of maternal perception as a source for temperament assessment.