Scaling of Early Social Cognitive Skills in Typically Developing Infants and Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Katherine Ellis, Phillipa Lewington, Powis Laurie, Chris Oliver, Jane Waite, Mary Heald, Ian Apperly, Priya Sandhu, Hayley Crawford

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

We delineate the sequence that typically developing infants pass tasks that assess different early social cognitive skills considered precursors to theory-of-mind abilities. We compared this normative sequence to performance on these tasks in a group of autistic (AUT) children. 86 infants were administered seven tasks assessing intention reading and shared intentionality (Study 1). Infants responses followed a consistent developmental sequence, forming a four-stage scale. These tasks were administered to 21 AUT children (Study 2), who passed tasks in the same sequence. However, performance on tasks that required following others’ eye gaze and cooperating with others was delayed. Findings indicate that earlier-developing skills provide a foundation for later-developing skills, and difficulties in acquiring some early social cognitive skills in AUT children.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)3988-4000
Number of pages13
JournalJournal of Autism and Developmental Disorders
Volume50
Issue number11
Early online date18 Mar 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2020

Bibliographical note

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Keywords

  • Autism spectrum disorder
  • Precursors
  • Social cognition
  • Theory of mind

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