Deception and Sabotage in Autistic, Retarded and Normal Children

Abstract

We investigated autistic, mentally retarded, and normal children's ability to deceive or obstruct an opponent. When required to tell a lie (saying that a box was locked) autistic children performed significantly worse than their controls, taking into account mental age. However, they readily prevented a competitor from gaining a reward by physical manipulation (locking a box). Their success on sabotage demonstrated that their failure on deception was not due to an inability to understand the task. Performance on deception was predicted by performance on a false belief attribution task. The present findings confirm that autistic children have a specific deficit in understanding and manipulating beliefs.

The Cambridge Mindreading (CAM) Face-Voice Battery: Testing Complex Emotion Recognition in Adults with and without Asperger Syndrome

“…Less than a third of the AS group members recognised this mental state successfully, which supports evidence from other studies, showing specific difficulty in understanding deception (Baron-Cohen, 1992;Sodian & Frith, 1992). One study found that high-functioning adults with autism had difficulties assessing the trustworthiness and approachability of people from pictures of their faces (Adolphs et al, 2001).…”

Meta-analyses comparing theory of mind abilities of individuals with autism, individuals with mental retardation, and normally developing individuals.

“…The rationale underlying this paradigm is that deception involves manipulating others' thoughts or beliefs Hughes & Russell, 1993;Russell et al, 1991;Sodian, 1991;Sodian & Frith, 1992;Yirmiya, Solomonica-Levi, Shulman, & Pilowsky, 1996). Additional paradigms include understanding various picture stories in which mental states are a central component (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1986;Happ6, 1994b;Tager-Flusberg & Sullivan, 1994b) and understanding mental-physical distinctions and the brain's function (BaronCohen, 1989b).…”

The linguistic and cognitive profile of Down syndrome: Evidence from a comparison with fragile X syndrome

“…Theory of mind is a dimension of social cognition, and it is the foundation for performance in a number of important social tasks, including meeting the informational needs of one's listener (Frith, 1996), creating a coherent and comprehensible narrative (Astington, 1994), soliciting confi rmation of one's interpretation of another person's sentences (Abbeduto, Short-Meyerson, Benson, Dolish & Weissman, 1998), reacting to emotional distress in others (Tager-Flusberg & Sullivan, 1994a), and even deception (Sodian & Frith, 1992). Previous research with aetiologically heterogeneous groups of persons with intellectual disabilities has shown theory of mind to be substantially delayed (Tager-Flusberg & Sullivan, 1994b), perhaps even to the point of lagging behind nonverbal MA in some individuals (Benson, Abbeduto, Short, Nuccio & Maas, 1993).…”