Mechanical, behavioural and Intentional understanding of picture stories in autistic children

High‐ability autistic children were compared with low‐ability Down's syndrome children and clinically normal preschool children on a picture sequencing task. When the sequences could be understood in terms of causal‐mechanical or simply descriptive‐behavioural criteria, the autistic children were at least as good as the controls and often showed superior performance. However, on sequences that evoked understanding in terms of psychological‐Intentional criteria, the autistic children performed much worse than the others. This pattern was also seen in the language used by the children in narrating the stories afterwards. In contrast to the controls, the autistic children used causal and behavioural language, but hardly ever mental state language. This experiment confirms and extends a previous study of ours which also tested the hypothesis of a specific cognitive deficit which apparently prevents the development of a ‘theory of mind’ in the autistic child.