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Research review: goals, intentions and mental states: challenges for theories of autism (2009)
| Venue: | J. Child Psychol. Psychiatry |
| Citations: | 3 - 0 self |
BibTeX
@ARTICLE{Hamilton09researchreview:,
author = {Antonia F. De C. Hamilton},
title = {Research review: goals, intentions and mental states: challenges for theories of autism},
journal = {J. Child Psychol. Psychiatry},
year = {2009},
pages = {881--892}
}
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Abstract
The ability to understand the goals and intentions behind other people’s actions is central to many social interactions. Given the profound social difficulties seen in autism, we might expect goal understanding to be impaired in these individuals. Two influential theories, the ‘broken mirror ’ theory and the mentalising theory, can both predict this result. However, a review of the current data provides little empirical support for goal understanding difficulties; several studies demonstrate normal performance by autistic children on tasks requiring the understanding of goals or intentions. I suggest that this conclusion forces us to reject the basic broken mirror theory and to re-evaluate the breadth of the mentalising theory. More subtle theories which distinguish between different types of mirroring and different types of mentalising may be able to account for the present data, and further research is required to test and refine these theories. Keywords: Autistic disorder, brain imaging, cognition, theory of mind. Every day, we see other people move through the world, taking objects from one location to another. From this complex visual array, we can effortlessly make infer-ences about goals and mental states – she wants to buy an apple; he is trying to find and answer his mobile phone; she likes coffee. One group of individuals, those with autism, can see the same scene but might not make the same inferences. Two current theories of autism, the ‘broken mirror ’ theory (Iacoboni & Dapretto,
Keyphrases
mental state research review mentalising theory broken mirror theory different type influential theory current data mobile phone autistic child goal understanding difficulty profound social difficulty people action basic broken mirror theory many social interaction current theory complex visual array autistic disorder iacoboni dapretto subtle theory normal performance brain imaging several study little empirical support present data
