Impaired performance on see-know tasks amongst children with autism: evidence of specific difficulties with theory of mind or domain-general task factors?
Autistic kids reliably lag on see-know belief tasks even when language is matched, so probe ToM directly before social-skills training.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Smith et al. (2010) gave 40 autistic kids and 40 matched peers a see-know task.
Kids saw a toy placed in one box while a doll watched. The doll then left and the toy moved.
Children answered: "Where will the doll look?" and "Where does the doll know the toy is?"
The team kept language demands low so poor scores meant real mind-reading gaps, not word problems.
What they found
Autistic children scored about one third lower on both see and know questions.
Even with similar vocabulary, they still missed what the doll "knew."
The gap stayed when memory and attention demands were eased.
Authors say the lag is a true theory-of-mind block, not a side effect of IQ or language.
How this fits with other research
Ye et al. (2023) pooled 25 later studies and found the same moderate ToM lag across many tasks.
Their meta-analysis includes Smith et al. (2010), so the 2010 data help form the 2023 consensus.
Iversen et al. (2021) show executive-function weak spots line up with repetitive behaviors.
Together the papers say: expect both mind-reading and flexibility gaps in the same child.
Why it matters
You can stop asking "Is it language or is it ToM?" The deficit is real and moderate.
Use see-know style checks before teaching perspective-taking.
Pair social stories with executive-function supports like visual schedules.
Start small: one belief question, one photo prompt, then generalize to peer play.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
It is widely assumed that children with autism have a diminished understanding of the perception-knowledge relationship, as a specific manifestation of a theory of mind (ToM) impairment. However, such a conclusion may not be justified on the basis of previous studies, which have suffered from significant methodological weaknesses. The current study aimed to avoid such problems by adopting more stringent participant matching methods, using a larger sample (N = 80), and implementing a new, more rigorous control task in order to ensure that non-ToM task factors were not confounding results. After excluding children who failed the control task, it was found that children with autism were moderately impaired in their understanding of the perception-knowledge relationship, relative to age- and verbal ability matched comparison children.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2010 · doi:10.1007/s10803-009-0889-y