SOCIAL COGNITION IN CHILDREN WITH VISUAL IMPAIRMENTS

This article reports on a study of children's understanding of the int entions of characters in a series of stories, found in previous resear ch to be impaired in children with autism but here investigated in 16 children with visual impairment and 16 sighted children. The children with visual impairment gave fewer correct justifications based on ment al states than did the sighted children. A small subgroup, identified on the basis of their cognitive style on a reading task and predominan tly children with congenital visual impairment, showed the most diffic ulty on this social cognition task.