Darwin's pioneering work in 1872 was one of the earliest sources of information about emotions within the evolutionary perspective. Today we have more sophisticated equipment that allows us to revisit some of the basic questions that he formulates. The present thesis contributed to a better understanding of the emotion recognition and theory of mind in children with ASD, presenting analyzes that may lead to suggestions of future clinical interventions. Although there is still inconsistency among studies as to which emotion is most impaired, difficulties in identifying the emotions of fear, anger, disgust and surprise have been reported. We use an eye-tracker to clarify how participants look at stimuli. The participants were 40 boys with ASD and typical development, matched for age (6 to 14 years). They were evaluated for IQ and for the level of autism. The visual stimuli were from the Emotional Recognition and Theory of Mind subtests of NEPSY II and presented with an eye-tracking device, with areas of interest (AI) defined. For each image, the fixation duration (in seconds) in each AI was computed. The participants also performed the tasks of the subtest, in order to verify the right and wrong answers in each stimulus. In our analyzes we could verify that the participants' age and IQ influenced the performance in the task of emotion recognition and did not influence the task of ToM. Children with ASD had an impaired performance when compared to children with TD in both subtests. Participants with ASD had a low score in tasks with negative valence emotions, such as sadness and anger. The classification of the ASD level had no influence on the participants' performance. What seems to occur is that beeing on the ASD clinical group is a condition to had a worse perform when compared to the TD group. Analyzing the eye tracking, we found that the TD group spent less time fixing the eyes in the AI of the eyes and longer in the AI of the mouth. As the total fixation time for the two groups did not have a statistical difference in the emotion recognition subtest, we can suggest that children with ASD have a look pattern that we call "diffuse", while children with TD have a look pattern which we call "focused" on regions of the face relevant to the recognition of emotions. It seems that in the ToM task, the fixation time in the eyes and mouth was not the determinant for the error in the response, but the diffuse look in the scene that was to be interpreted. When we evaluate the qualitative results of eye tracking we can think of the importance of interventions that can help children with ASD improve their performance in identifying the facial expressions that aid in the decoding of emotion and the interpretation of mental states.