Visual perspective taking in children with autism spectrum condition

Antonia Hamilton, Amy Pearson, Dani Ropar

The ability to consider what another person can see (visual perspective taking, VPT) depends on more basic social and spatial abilities and may contribute to social skills such as theory of mind.  We have recently shown that children with autism find VPT difficult.  Here, we follow up on these results and test if different children use different strategies to solve a VPT task.  30 children with autism and 30 IQ matched typical children completed tasks assessing visual perspective taking, mental rotation, theory of mind and matching of body postures.  Replicating previous results, we found an interaction between diagnostic group and performance on the VPT / mental rotation tasks.  Furthermore, we found that typical children’s performance on the VPT task was predicted by their ability to match body postures.  In contrast, autistic children’s VPT performance was predicted by their ability to mentally rotate objects.  This suggests that typical and autistic children draw on different cognitive mechanisms to solve perspective taking tasks.

The results of these studies give new insights into the basic spatial and social mechanisms underlying perspective taking, and emphasis the role of body representations in social cognition.