Preverbal children with autism understand the intentions of others

There is a ‘theory of mind’ theory of autism. Meltzoff has recently developed a procedure that gives a nonverbal assessment of ‘theory of mind’. A group of children with autism and a matched control group of normally developing infants were given three of Meltzoff’s tasks and three conventional, gestural imitation tasks. The children with autism showed the expected deficits on gestural imitation, but were significantly better than the normally developing infants on the Meltzoff tasks. The implications of these results for a number of theoretical issues are discussed.