This study supports earlier findings that individuals with AS/HFA have difficulties attributing mental states in context, but seem to have significantly fewer difficulties inferring physical states. The fact that the clinical group also used significant longer reaction time and needed significantly more prompt questions to solve the tasks relative to the control group may also be related to their problems in understanding mental states. However, the possibility remains that these difficulties could represent a separate factor - or a distinct 'cognitive style'- suggesting that at least some individuals with AS may be generally slow in solving cognitive tasks.

Although a number of advanced theory of mind tasks have been developed, there is a dearth of information on whether performances on different tasks are associated. The present study examined the performance of 21 children and adolescents with diagnoses of Asperger syndrome (AS) and 20 typically developing controls on three advanced theory of mind tasks: The Eyes Task, the Strange Stories, and the Stories from Everyday Life. The participants in the clinical group demonstrated lower performance than the controls on all the three tasks. The pattern of findings, however, indicates that these tasks may share different information-processing requirements in addition to tapping different mentalizing abilities.

The aim of the present study was to assess mental flexibility and set maintenance of a group of individuals with Asperger syndrome (AS) or high-functioning autism (HFA) (N = 13; mean age 16,4), as compared with a matched group of typically developing children and adolescents (N = 13; mean age 15,6) on the computerized version of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). The participants in the AS/HFA group performed less well than the controls on all categories of the WCST, but the differences did not reach conventional statistical significance on most categories of the WCST. On the category failure to maintain set, however, the AS/HFA participants performed significantly less well than the controls, suggesting a deficit of focused attention.

The aim of the present study was to assess the findings, reported in earlier studies, that individuals with autism spectrum disorders process visuo-spatial tasks faster than typically developing control persons. The participants in the present study were children and adolescents with Asperger syndrome (AS) or high-functioning autism (HFA) (N = 13), and a matched group of typically developing children and adolescents (N = 13). The results showed that the participants in the clinical group performed marginally less well than those in the control group on both the Block Design Test and the Embedded Figures Test, but the differences were not statistically significant. Thus, earlier findings suggesting that individuals with autism spectrum disorders solve non-social cognitive tasks faster than typically developing control persons were not replicated. The results are discussed with special reference to the hypothesis of weak central coherence.

In the present study the response times of 10- to 20-year-old participants with Asperger syndrome (AS) (N=21) of normal intelligence and a control group of typically developing individuals (N=20) were recorded on a new 'advanced' test of theory of mind. This test taps the ability to make mental-state inferences versus physical-state inferences in a story context. The participants with AS were significantly slower than the controls on both tasks. In addition, the differences in response times between mental- and physical-state inference were significantly larger in the AS group than in the control group, suggesting that the clinical group experienced more problems than the controls in making inferences about mental states than about physical states.