Engaging with the self: Mirror behaviour in autism, Down syndrome and typical development.
Autistic kids may know the mirror shows 'me,' but they still act less social in front of it.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team watched preschoolers play in front of a mirror. They compared kids with autism, kids with Down syndrome, and typically developing kids.
They counted how often each child copied their own moves, smiled at themselves, or gave a shy, coy smile. They also checked if the child knew the mirror showed their own image.
What they found
Children with autism copied fewer mirror moves and showed almost no coy smiles. Their positive facial affect was lower than both other groups.
Yet most kids with autism still passed the basic mirror self-recognition test. The social mirror gap was not because they failed to see themselves.
How this fits with other research
Last et al. (1984) showed most autistic preschoolers can spot their own face. Vasudevi et al. now add that even with intact recognition, the playful, social side of mirror use is missing.
Schulte-Rüther et al. (2017) seems to disagree: they found automatic facial mimicry was intact in older autistic youth. The gap likely comes from age and task. Preschool free play taps social joy, while lab facial tasks tap quick reflexes.
Hsieh et al. (2014) turned the same mirror setup into teaching. They added joint-attention mirror games and saw self-awareness grow, proving the mirror can be a therapy tool, not just a probe.
Why it matters
Mirror play gives you a 60-second snapshot of social-self engagement. If a child copies moves, smiles, or shows coy affect, social motivation is online. If the mirror draws a blank, embed social rewards there: model silly poses, pair the reflection with favorite items, or invite a peer to join the game. Tracking coy smiles over weeks can show whether your social interventions are reaching the child's sense of self.
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Join Free →During play, place a shatter-proof mirror near the child; model one silly pose and deliver a preferred item only if the child copies or smiles at the reflection.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Children with autism achieve mirror self-recognition appropriate to developmental age, but are nonetheless reported to have problems in other aspects of a sense of self. We observed behaviour in the mirror in 12 pre-school children with autism, 13 pre-school children with Down syndrome (DS) and 13 typically developing (TD) toddlers. Reliable differences in reflecting actions, social relatedness and positive affect towards themselves, and an absence of coy smiles differentiated the children with autism from the others. The children with DS showed the highest interest in their own faces. These differences were largely independent of mirror self-recognition (MSR), broadly supporting arguments for dissociation between interpersonal and conceptual aspects of self. Mirror behaviour may be a subtle but easily elicited measure of the social quality of a sense of self.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2010 · doi:10.1177/1362361310370397