Understanding People and Understanding Objects: Characterizing Folk Theories In Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

Background: The extreme male brain theory of ASD has progressed from the early “folk psychology (FPS) versus folk physics (FPH)” theme to an overarching theoretical model supported by neuropsychological and neurobiological studies (Klin, 2009). However, a gap in the folk theory literature remains; namely, little is known about FPS and FPH in young children with ASD.

Children with ASD demonstrate impairment in FPS; particularly in theory of mind (ToM), or the ability to infer mental states of others (Pellicano, 2010). In contrast to this deficit, older children and adolescents with ASD exhibit advanced abilities in FPH (Baron-Cohen et al., 2000). The current study is the first to our knowledge to examine the relationship between ToM and a measure of FPH, the gravity error task (GE; Hood et al., 2006), in young children with ASD and typically developing (TD) children.

Objectives: To determine 1) whether young children with ASD will perform poorer on ToM tasks, but better on GE tasks compared to TD children, and 2) the relationship between ToM and GE within the ASD and TD groups.

Methods: Participants are 40 ASD and 40 TD children (M = 6.32 years, SD = 2.35). Over two sessions, children were administered a battery of ToM tasks including two analogous versions of the “Smarties” and “Sally-Anne” false-belief tasks (Baron-Cohen et al., 1986; Wimmer & Hartl, 1991) and the appearance-reality task (Sapp et al., 2003). Children were also administered basic and advanced GE tasks. One parent of each child was administered the SCQ (Rutter et al., 2001) in order to confirm ASD diagnosis.

Results: Preliminary analyses are based on 22 ASD and 22 TD children. Mann-Whitney tests indicated that the TD group outperformed the ASD group on the ToM tasks (z = -2.015, p < .05). No significant group differences were found on the basic or advanced GE tasks (z = -.292, NS; z = -1.336, NS). In the ASD group, higher ToM scores were positively correlated with better performance on the advanced GE task (Spearman’s r = .599, p = .031). The relationship between ToM and GE was not significant in the TD group.

Conclusions: Preliminary results indicate that young children with ASD exhibited ToM impairment, but did not demonstrate advanced performance or impairment in FPH. These findings are somewhat inconsistent with the few previous studies in this area. In prior research, older children and adolescents with high functioning ASD have demonstrated advanced FPH, and FPS and FPH were negatively correlated in ASD samples. One interpretation could be that the previously reported advanced abilities undergo a protracted development, such that they are not detectable until an older age. Alternatively, these results may indicate that advanced FPH abilities are not universal in ASD. Final analyses will be conducted on the full sample, and will include age and verbal intelligence as covariates. Findings from the current study will serve to better characterize the developmental trajectory of folk theories in ASD and TD children, including whether FPS and FPH are modular or domain general in nature.