Twenty years after research on children's 'theory of mind' began, this field continues to be a leading influence in the study of developmental psychology and psychopathology. In this review we examine the contribution of research on children's theories of mind to our understanding of children's developing social relationships. Evidence shows that for both typical and atypical populations this relationship is neither uniform nor unidirectional. Theory-of-mind skills are multifaceted and the nature of the developmental relationship between different aspects is not yet known, and there is evidence that theory-of-mind skills both transform and are transformed by interpersonal and family relationships and by language communities. To understand the multifaceted and complex nature of development in this area, we need clearer definitions of the skills under investigation, as well as research designs that capture the transactional nature of the relationship between theory of mind and social relations. Addressing these issues should help to clarify (i) the processes by which children's developing understanding of others is influenced by the social environment, and (ii) issues concerning the specificity of theory-of-mind impairments in atypical populations and the processes by which these impairments develop.After more than 20 years of pre-eminence, investigations into children's developing theories of mind continue to lead current research in developmental psychology. A key reason for the intense academic interest in this topic is a general acceptance that theory-of-mind skills transform and/or are transformed by children's close relationships. Before reviewing the evidence for this proposal we first address two issues that become recurring themes in this paper, namely the problems of defining 'theory of mind' and of disentangling environmental and genetic influences on children's theory of mind. Next we consider how developments of theory of mind transform children's social relations, and here our main objective is to complement the recent excellent Correspondence should be addressed to Claire

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition in which children show reduced attention to social aspects of the environment. However in adults with ASD, evidence for social attentional deficits is equivocal. One problem is that many paradigms present social information in an unrealistic, isolated way. This study presented adults and adolescents, with and without ASD, with a complex social scene alongside another, non-social scene, and measured eye-movements during a 3-s viewing period. Analyses first identified viewing time to different regions and then investigated some more complex issues. These were: the location of the very first fixation in a trial (indicating attentional priority); the effect of a task instruction on scan paths; the extent to which gaze-following was evident; and the degree to which participants' scan paths were influenced by the low-level properties of a scene. Results indicate a superficially normal attentional preference for social information in adults with ASD. However, more sensitive measures show that ASD does entail social attention problems across the lifespan, supporting accounts of the disorder which emphasise lifelong neurodevelopmental atypicalities. These subtle abnormalities may be sufficient to produce serious difficulties in real-life scenarios.

This study investigated how children detect the attitude behind irony and distinguish it from the attitude conveyed by a white lie. Two hypotheses were tested:(1) the ability to distinguish the second-order intentions of the liar vs. ironist (i.e. what each wants the listener to know) should be a prerequisite for the ability to distinguish ironic from deceptive attitude; (2) the presence of distinctive intonations (sarcastic \ T. sincere) should facilitate the distinction between ironic and deceptive attitude. Five-to 7-year-olds heard two stories which ended in either a deceptive or an ironic statement. Children distinguished between the stories in two ways: (a) in terms of whether the speaker wanted the listener to believe him or not (secondorder intention judgement); (b) in terms of whether the speaker was being mean or nice (attitude judgement). In one condition, the final utterances were distinguished by intonation (sarcastic for the irony, sincere for the lie); in the other condition, the utterances were spoken identically, without intonation, in the form of an indirect quote. Results supported the first but not the second hypothesis. Almost all children who failed to make correct second-order judgements also failed to distinguish which speaker was being mean (ironist) and which was being nice (white liar). However, those who succeeded on the second-order question but failed the attitude question were equally distributed across the intonation and no-intonation conditions. Thus, for children of this age, intonation failed to facilitate the ability to distinguish the negative attitude conveyed by irony from the positive attitude conveyed by a white lie.

Children with autism are known to have difficulties in sharing attention with others. Yet one joint attention behaviour, the ability to follow another person's head turn and gaze direction, may be achieved without necessarily sharing attention. Why, then, should autistic children have difficulties with it? In this study we examined the extent of this difficulty by testing school-aged autistic children across three different contexts; experiment, observation, and parent interview. We also tested whether the ability to orient to another person's head and gaze could be facilitated by increasing children's attention to environmental targets and social cues. Results for experiment and observation demonstrate that a sizeable proportion of children with autism did not have difficulties with following another's head turn. There was a difference between children with high and low verbal mental ages, however. Whereas children with higher mental ages (over 48 months) were able to orient spontaneously to another person's head turn, children with lower mental ages had difficulties with this response. When cues were added (pointing, language) or when feedback from targets was given, however, their performance improved. Parent interview data indicated that children with autism, whatever their mental age, began to follow head turn and gaze direction years later than typically developing children. Developments in attention and language are proposed as possible factors to account for this developmental delay.

People in the general population are typically very poor at detecting changes in pictures of complex scenes. The degree of this 'change blindness', however, varies with the content of the scene: when an object is semantically important or contextually inappropriate, people may be more effective at detecting changes. Two experiments investigated change blindness in people with autism, who are known from previous research to be efficient in detecting features yet poor at processing stimuli for meaning and context. The first experiment measured the effect of semantic information while the second investigated the role of context in directing attention. In each task, participants detected the dissimilarity between pairs of images. Both groups showed a main effect of image type in both experimental tasks, showing that their attention was directed to semantically meaningful and contextually inappropriate items. However, the autistic group also showed a greater difficulty detecting changes to semantically marginal items in the first experiment. Conclusions point to a normal selection of items for attention in people with autism spectrum disorders, although this may be combined with difficulty switching or disengaging attention.