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What Do Executive Factors Contribute to the Failure on False Belief Tasks by Children with Autism?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 1999

James Russell ,
Rebecca Saltmarsh  and
Elisabeth Hill
James Russell
Affiliation:
Cambridge University, U.K.
Rebecca Saltmarsh
Affiliation:
Cambridge University, U.K.
Elisabeth Hill
Affiliation:
Cambridge University, U.K.
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Abstract

As children with autism have pervasive executive difficulties it is necessary to determine whether these contribute to their often-reported failure on the false belief task. Failure on this task is frequently taken to diagnose the lack of a “theory of mind”. We report two studies using two tasks that make similar executive demands to the false belief task. The first experiment showed that children with autism are significantly challenged by a “conflicting desire” task, which suggests that their difficulty with the false belief task is not rooted in difficulty with grasping the representational nature of belief. In the second study children with autism were also found to be impaired on a novel version of the “false photograph task”. A parsimonious reading of these data is that their difficulty with all three tasks is due to commonalities in the tasks' executive structure.

Keywords

Autismexecutive functionsconflicting desiresfalse belief taskfalse photograph taskdiagnostic testscognition
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines , Volume 40 , Issue 6 , September 1999 , pp. 859 - 868
Copyright
© 1999 Association for Child Psychology and Psychiatry

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