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What Children with Autism Understand about Thoughts and Thought Bubbles

University of Nottingham, UK

Peter Mitchell

University of Nottingham, UK

Children were tested on a series of tasks utilizing the pictorial convention of thought bubbles. In the first study, children with autism (mean verbal mental age 7:6 years) successfully interpreted thought bubbles as representational devices that could be used (a) to infer an unknown reality and (b) to inform them about the content of false beliefs. In the second study, children with autism (mean VMA 5:7 years) and children with non-specific learning disabilities (mean VMA 4:9 years) were tested on two false belief tasks which depicted the content of a protagonist’s belief encapsulated in a thought bubble and two that did not. In both groups, performance was improved in the ‘bubble condition’. It appears that at least some children with autism are capable of understanding thought bubbles as representational devices.

Key Words: autism • false belief • representations • theory of mind • thought bubbles

Autism, Vol. 3, No. 1, 17-38 (1999)
DOI: 10.1177/1362361399003001003


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