ADMINISTRATION OF A COMPLETELY NON-VERBAL FALSE BELIEF TEST FOR CHILDREN WITH ASD

Background: Recent studies adopted completely non-verbal false belief tasks to the preverbal infants, using children's looking behaviour as a dependant measurement. These studies have revealed that children younger than 3 years of age, who consistently fail the standard verbal false belief test, can anticipate others' action based on their attributed false beliefs. These tests would be beneficial for children with limited linguistic abilities. However, so far these studies have been limited to the typically developing children and it is still unknown whether children with ASD, who are known to have difficulties in the standard verbal false belief test, would also fail in a non-verbal false belief test.

Objectives: The current study examined whether children with ASD show action anticipation in a non-verbal false belief test.

Methods: We presented video stimuli of an actor watching an object hidden in a box. The object was then displaced while the actor was looking away. We recorded children's eye movement with an eye-tracking device while they watched the subsequent action and coded whether they spontaneously anticipated the model's behaviour that could only have been predicted based on her false belief. We also administered a standard verbal false belief task and examined the relation between verbal and non-verbal false belief tasks both in typically developing children and in children with ASD.

Results: In the non-verbal false belief task, although typically developing children correctly anticipated the action, children with ASD failed to show such action anticipation. The performance in the non-verbal false belief task positively correlated with that of the standard false belief task in typically developing children. In contrast, these two tasks were not correlated with each other in children with ASD.

Conclusions: The results suggest that children with ASD have an inherent impairment in false belief attribution, which is independent of their verbal ability.