ABSTRACT
Twenty-four high-functioning adults with autism (16 men) who passed a first-order theory-of-mind task and 24 nonautistic adults (10 men) attributed mental states to recordings of various verbal intonations and to photos of people's eyes to assess advanced theory of mind. Participants with autism performed significantly worse than nonautistic participants on both tasks. Thus, the previously described inattention to others' eyes exhibited by adults with autism is not solely responsible for their inability to attribute mental states from eyes, as they also did not correctly attribute mental states from voices. These findings support the view that a core deficit for people with autism lies in their theory of mind, that is, their inability to attribute mental states to others.
Subject(s)
Attention , Autistic Disorder/diagnosis , Intelligence , Internal-External Control , Interpersonal Relations , Social Perception , Adolescent , Adult , Autistic Disorder/psychology , Concept Formation , Emotions , Female , Humans , Male , Pilot Projects , Speech Perception , ThinkingABSTRACT
The relationship between reflection-impulsivity, hypothese generation and testing, and evaluation of the quality of one's own solutions was explored in the framework of Kagan's theory. The Matching Familiar Figures test (MFF) and a pattern-matching task were administered to 94 children from 8-0 to 11-11 years. Multiple regression analyses and analyses of variance showed that children who were inaccurate on the MFF were more likely to offer a solution on the pattern-matching task before they had sufficient information to guarantee a correct solution and to make errors despite sufficient information to have avoided those errors. Thus reflection-impulsivity as measured by the MFF were related to 2 other measures of the evaluation process on another visual match-to-sample task. Only 1 of 3 hypothesis-testing variables was significantly related to MFF performance, and that relationship was rather small.
