J Child Psychol Psychiatry
September 1999
As children with autism have pervasive executive difficulties it is necessary to determine whether these contribute to their often-reported failure on the false belief task. Failure on this task is frequently taken to diagnose the lack of a "theory of mind". We report two studies using two tasks that make similar executive demands to the false belief task.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Child Psychol
April 1998
This study was designed to help clarify some of the circumstances under which young children find it easier to acknowledge a false belief held by another person. In Experiment 1, preschoolers (mean age, 3 years; 11 months) watched a movie in which Ness had previously opened a familiar box in Jon's absence to reveal the stereotypical content, which she proceeded to replace with an atypical item. In a second movie, the box was seen to house an atypical content all along.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Child Psychol Psychiatry
September 1997
Children with autism and children with Down's syndrome watched the following enactment. A protagonist put one item in location A and another in location B and then left the scene. Subsequently, the items were swapped the other way round.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn a standard deceptive box procedure, children aged around 3 years typically fail to acknowledge their own prior false beliefs. For example, they judge incorrectly that they had initially thought a Smarties tube contained pencils after discovering these to be the actual content. Wimmer and Hart (1991) showed that children were more likely to answer correctly in a variant of this task known as a "state change", procedure.
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