BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online

    Absence of spontaneous action anticipation by false belief attribution in children with autism spectrum disorder

    Senju, Atsushi and Southgate, Victoria and Miura, Y. and Matsui, T. and Hasegawa, T. and Tojo, Y. and Osanai, H. and Csibra, Gergely (2010) Absence of spontaneous action anticipation by false belief attribution in children with autism spectrum disorder. Development and Psychopathology 22 (2), pp. 353-360. ISSN 0954-5794.

    [img]
    Preview
    Text
    2327.pdf - Author's Accepted Manuscript

    Download (806kB) | Preview

    Abstract

    Recently, a series of studies demonstrated false belief understanding in young children through completely nonverbal measures. These studies have revealed that children younger than 3 years of age, who consistently fail the standard verbal false belief test, can anticipate others' actions based on their attributed false beliefs. The current study examined whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), who are known to have difficulties in the verbal false belief test, may also show such action anticipation in a nonverbal false belief test. We presented video stimuli of an actor watching an object being hidden in a box. The object was then displaced while the actor was looking away. We recorded children's eye movements and coded whether they spontaneously anticipated the actor's subsequent behavior, which could only have been predicted if they had attributed a false belief to her. Although typically developing children correctly anticipated the action, children with ASD failed to show such action anticipation. The results suggest that children with ASD have an impairment in false belief attribution, which is independent of their verbal ability.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences
    Research Centres and Institutes: Brain and Cognitive Development, Centre for (CBCD)
    Depositing User: Administrator
    Date Deposited: 06 Jan 2011 11:48
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 16:52
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/2327

    Statistics

    Activity Overview
    6 month trend
    1,711Downloads
    6 month trend
    667Hits

    Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.

    Archive Staff Only (login required)

    Edit/View Item
    Edit/View Item