title: Visual perspective taking impairment in children with autistic spectrum disorder.
abstract: Evidence from typical development and neuroimaging studies suggests that level 2 visual perspective taking - the knowledge that different people may see the same thing differently at the same time - is a mentalising task. Thus, we would expect children with autism, who fail typical mentalising tasks like false belief, to perform poorly on level 2 visual perspective taking as well. However, prior data on this issue are inconclusive. We re-examined this question, testing a group of 23 young autistic children, aged around 8years with a verbal mental age of around 4years and three groups of typical children (n=60) ranging in age from 4 to 8years on a level 2 visual perspective task and a closely matched mental rotation task. The results demonstrate that autistic children have difficulty with visual perspective taking compared to a task requiring mental rotation, relative to typical children. Furthermore, performance on the level 2 visual perspective taking task correlated with theory of mind performance. These findings resolve discrepancies in previous studies of visual perspective taking in autism, and demonstrate that level 2 visual perspective taking is a mentalising task.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, Notts NG7 2RD, United Kingdom. antonia.hamilton@nottingham.ac.uk
authors.forename: Antonia F de C
authors.initials: AF
authors.lastname: Hamilton
authors.forename: Rachel
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Brindley
authors.forename: Uta
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Frith
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D001321:Autistic Disorder / Q000503:physiopathology*; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D003210:Concept Formation / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination / Q000502:physiology*; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology; D012938:Social Perception; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology