Assignment: The Autistic Child

Assignment: The Autistic Child

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Assignment: The Autistic Child

Assignment: Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”?*

We use a new model of metarepresentational development to predict a cognitive deficit which could explain a crucial component of the social impairment in childhood autism. One of the manifestations of a basic metarepresentational ca- pacity is a ‘theory of mind’. We have reason to believe that autistic children lack such a ‘theory’. If this were so, then they would be unable to impute beliefs to others and to predict their behaviour. This hypothesis was tested using Wimmer and Perner’s puppet play paradigm. Normal children and those with Down’s syndrome were used as controls for a group of autistic children. Even though the mental age of the autistic children was higher than that of the controls, they alone failed to impute beliefs to others. Thus the dysfunction we have postula- ted and demonstrated is independent of mental retardation and specific to autism.

1. Introduction

Childhood autism is a severe developmental disorder. It is a rare condition, affecting about 4 in every 10,000 children. The diagnostic criteria at present are behavioural (American Psychiatric Association, 1980; Kanner, 1943; Ritvo & Freeman, 1978; Rutter, 1978) and the main symptom, which can be reliably identified, is impairment in verbal and nonverbal communication. This impairment is part of the core feature of childhood autism, namely a profound disorder in understanding and coping with the social environment, regardless

*We are grateful to John Morton for his helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We would also like to thank staff and children of the various schools which participated in the study. The experiment was carried out by Simon Baron-Cohen as part of his Ph.D thesis (Dept. Psychology, University of London). Reprint requests should be addressed to: Uta Frith, MRC Cognitive Development Unit, 17 Gordon Street, London WC1H OAH, United Kingdom.

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38 S. Baron-Cohen et al.

of IQ. Additional symptoms can occur, in particular, mental retardation, islets of ability, and ‘insistence on sameness’. Nevertheless, the pathognomonic symptom is failure to develop normal social relationships.

Autistic children find even the immediate social environment unpredictable and incomprehensible. They are often said in some sense to ‘treat people and objects alike’. Wing and Gould (1979) in their epidemiological study of severely retarded autistic children bring out the range of socially impaired behaviour: from total withdrawal through passivity to repetitive pestering. Lord’s (1984) review of work on peer interaction in autistic children highlights the low level of social competence even in able autistic children, despite improvements due to intervention. A picture of apparently intractable social impairment emerges in the clinical follow-up studies of autism (e.g. Kanner, 1971; Kanner, Rodriguez, & Ashenden, 1972) and in the as yet rare experi- mental investigations (e.g. Attwood, 1984; Martini, 1980).

Although the majority of autistic children are mentally retarded (DeMyer et al., 1974; Wing, Yeates, Brierley, & Gould 1976), and although a number of their symptoms may be attributable to this fact (Hermelin & O’Connor, 1970) this in itself cannot be a sufficient explanation for their social impair- ments. First, there are autistic children with IQ’s in the normal range, and second, mentally retarded non-autistic children, such as Down’s syndrome, are socially competent relative to their mental age (Coggins, Carpenter, & Owings, 1983; Gibson, 1978).

In order to explain the specific impairments of childhood autism it is necessary, then, to consider the underlying cognitive mechanisms independent of IQ (Frith, 1982; Hermelin & O’Connor, 1970; Rutter, 1983). So far, nobody has had any idea of how to characterise such mechanisms in even quasi-com- putational terms. In this paper we put forward a suggestion which has been derived from a new model of metarepresentational development (Leslie, 1984, to appear). This model specifies a mechanism which underlies a crucial aspect of social skills, namely being able to conceive of mental states: that is, knowing that other people know, want, feel, or believe things; in short, having what Premack and Woodruff (1978) termed a ‘theory of mind’. A theory of mind is impossible without the capacity to form ‘second-order representations’ (Dennett, 1978; Pylyshyn, 1978). According to Leslie’s model this capacity does not appear until the second year of life. While this capacity manifests itself eventually in a theory of mind, Leslie shows that it also accounts for the emergence of pretend play. An absence of the capacity to form second-order representations, then, would lead not only to a lack of theory of mind, with the concomitant aspects of social ineptness, but also to a lack of pretend play.

Now, it is well known that autistic children, in addition to their social hand- icaps, also show a striking poverty of pretend play (Sigman & Ungerer, 1981;

Question 01

Please watch this brief video illustrating Piaget’s classic studies of conservation in the preoperational stage:

Conservation task (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

Give at least two reasons why Piaget says that young children cannot conserve.

Question 02

Would you describe your own gender identity as “feminine”, “masculine”, or “androgynous”? What biological and social factors might have influenced your gender identity?

Question 03

Three-year-old Ben lives in the country, with no other preschoolers nearby. His parents wonder whether it is worth driving Ben into town once a week to participate in a peer play group. What advice would you give Ben’s parents, and why?

Number of Pages: 2

Deadline: 5 hours

Format: APA

References: At least 5

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