502

INFANT PRECURSORS OF THEORY OF MIND ABILITIES lN AUTISM AND DEXELOPMENTAL DISABILITIRS

Norman Kim and Marian Sigman

Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563

Children with autism have been shown to have a particular inabiity to attribute different mental states to other people, called “theory of mind,” a deficit which is thought to be central to the impairments in social functioning and communication characteristic of the disorder. But the symptomatology of autism is often present in the first years of life, before the development of theory of mind abilities in even typically developing chikhen. Two categories of early infant behavior, play and joint attention, have also been noted to be impaired in autistic chiklren. Autistic children tend to exhibit less diversity in their play and make fewer attempts to share their experience of the world with their caregiver by engaging in bids for joint attention; social referencing to an adult to inform itself of its surroundings. We investigated the associations between these early behaviors and later performance on a theory of mind task in autistic children and non- autistic, developmentally disabled children.

Children diagnosed with autism or developmental disability were tested as part of a longitudinal research program examinin g the acquisition of nonverbal and verbal communication skills in young children with developmental disabilities. To assess joint attention behaviors, the children were videotaped with an experimenter for approximately 20 minutes while being administered an interaction task involving randomized episodes of different types of social interactions. The tapes were then coded by two independent raters for frequency of joint attention behaviors, including the child showing the experimenter an object, alternating gaze between a toy and the experimenter, and pointing to objects, as well as the child’s responses to these bids for joint attention. The children were also observed in a semistructured play situation and the duration and number of different kinds of functional and symbolic play acts were coded from videotape. These same children were assessed again approximately 8-9 years later, during which time they were administered the ‘M&M” false-belief task to assess theory of mind, which was coded as failure on the control question (0), passing only the control question (1), passing the key questions (2), or passing the key and justification questions (3).

Pearson product-moment correlations were computed separately for the autistic group (n=l6) and the developmentally disabled group (n=23) examining the associations between joint attention behaviors and play acts at time 1, and performance on theory of mind tasks at time 2. In the autistic group, both initiating (r = 51, p < .05) and responding ti = .57, p < .05) to bids for joint attention significantly predicted per8ormance on the theory of mind task, with the number of different symbolic play acts approaching significance (1: = .40, p = .lO). There were no signifiat associations found with other joint attention behaviors (such as behavior regulation or social interaction), or functional play acts. For the developmentally disabled group (n=23), none of these variables significantly predicted theory of mind performance, although initiating joint attention approached significance (z = .38, p = .07).

These results indicate that precursors to theory of mind abilities may be reflected in autistic infants’ initiating and responding to bids for joint attention, skills in which they have been shown to be deficient. The propensity to share attention with another may be seen as an early manifestation of the ability to project states of mind onto another, skills necessary for the development of theory of mind. Identifying such early precursors to theory of mind abilities is an important task not only in determining the pathogenesis of the core deficits which may be present, but in the early identification of children at risk for developing the disorder.