COMPONENTS OF PERSON PERCEPTION - AN INVESTIGATION WITH AUTISTIC, NON-AUTISTIC RETARDED AND TYPICALLY DEVELOPING-CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS

This study is an attempt to analyse whether there may be separable com ponents to the human ability to perceive people as people who engage i n actions and who have attitudes. We adopted the approach of developme ntal psychopathology. Matched groups of typically developing, autistic and non-autistic retarded(MR) children and adolescents were tested fo r the ability to recognize videotaped representations of 'a person', a person's actions and a person's emotion-related attitudes and allied subjective states as manifest in moving point-light images of people. Autistic and non-autistic MR participants did not differ in the abilit y to recognize that a person was represented in very brief exposures o f a walking point-light display; autistic, MR and typically developing participants were equally able to recognize a person's actions. Non-a utistic MR and typically developing participants were also similar in their propensity to notice a person's attitudes vis-a-vis the person's actions, and in their abilities to recognize actions and attitudes wh en specifically asked to do so. By comparison, however, autistic parti cipants were specifically impaired in attending to and discriminating people's attitudes and states. The results are discussed in relation t o current debates on the nature of basic person-perceptual abilities t hat may underpin typically developing children's understanding of pers ons with minds ('theory of mind'). We also consider their relevance fo r controversies over the primary deficits in autism.