AN ADVANCED TEST OF THEORY OF MIND - UNDERSTANDING OF STORY CHARACTERS THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS BY ABLE AUTISTIC, MENTALLY-HANDICAPPED, AND NORMAL-CHILDREN AND ADULTS

Research has suggested that the core handicaps of autism result from a specific impairment in theory of mind (ToM). However, this account ha s been challenged by the finding that a minority of autistic subjects pass lst- and even 2nd-order ToM tests while remaining socially handic apped. In the present study, able autistic subjects who failed ToM tas ks, those who passed 1st-order, and those who passed 2nd-order tasks w ere tested with a battery of more naturalistic and complex stories. Au tistic subjects were impaired at providing context-appropriate mental state explanations for the story characters' nonliteral utterances, co mpared to normal and mentally handicapped controls. Performance on the stories was closely related to performance on standard ToM tasks, but even those autistic subjects who passed all ToM tests showed impairme nts on the more naturalistic story materials relative to normal adult controls.