Attribution of Mechanical and Social Causality to Animated Displays by Children with Autism

Abstract

Two studies are reported that compare the descriptions given by children with and without autism of animated stimuli depicting mechanical launching effects, intentional reactions or sequences of mechanical and intentional reactions. Children were matched on chronological age, verbal mental age and IQ. The children with autism were as able as the control groups at differentiating mechanical launches from intentional reactions. Moreover, their descriptions of the longer action sequence were significantly different neither in length nor in their use of mental state language from those of the controls. However, finer-grained analyses of the accounts showed that the children with autism involved themselves more in the narrative than did control children. They also made less reference to episodes showing actions between animate objects, especially when the objects were not in contact. The implications of these findings for theories of autistic social dysfunction are discussed.