We use a new model of metarepresentational development to predict a cognitive deficit which could explain a crucial component of the social impairment in childhood autism. One of the manifestations of a basic metarepresentational capacity is a 'theory of mind'. We have reason to believe that autistic children lack such a 'theory'. If this were so, then they would be unable to impute beliefs to others and to predict their behaviour. This hypothesis was tested using Wimmer and Perner's puppet play paradigm. Normal children and those with Down's syndrome were used as controls for a group of autistic children. Even though the mental age of the autistic children was higher than that of the controls, they alone failed to impute beliefs to others. Thus the dysfunction we have postulated and demonstrated is independent of mental retardation and specific to autism. *We are grateful to John Morton for his helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We would also like to thank staff and children of the various schools which participated in the study. The experiment was carried out by Simon Baron-Cohen as part of his Ph.D thesis (

One of the major developments of the second year of human life is the emergence of the ability to pretend. A child's knowledge of a real situation is apparently contradicted and distorted by pretense. If, as generally assumed, the child is just beginning to construct a system for internally representing such knowledge, why is this system of representation not undermined by its use in both comprehending and producing pretense? In this article I present a theoretical analysis of the representational mechanism underlying this ability. This mechanism extends the power of the infant's existing capacity for (primary) representation, creating a capacity for metarepresentation. It is this, developing I am deeply indebted to Uta Frith, John Morton, and Josef Perner for long hours of discussion on the topic of this article and for detailed comments on earlier versions. I am also grateful to

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The idea of cause and effect is often assumed to originate in prolonged learning. However, the present findings suggest that 27-week-old infants may already perceive a cause-effect relationship. Reversal of an apparently causal event (direct launching) produced more recovery of attention following habituation than the reversal of a similar but apparently non-causal event (delayed reaction). In both cases the changes in the spatiotemporal properties of the stimuli were identical. Hence the infant's percept of direct launching may involve more than an encoding of its spatiotemporal properties. Since the same kind of stimulus gives rise to a causal illusion in adults, it may be that the additional factor at work is the perception of a causal relationship. This finding may be significant in terms of the modularity of the infant visual system and the later development of causal understanding.The idea of cause and effect lies at the heart of both commonsense and scientific thought. The question of its origins in psychological development has long been a topic of speculation (e.g.

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