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There is a`theory of mind' theory of autism. Meltzoff has recently developed a procedure that gives a nonverbal assessment of`theory of mind'. A group of children with autism and a matched control group of normally developing infants were given three of Meltzoff's tasks and three conventional, gestural imitation tasks. The children with autism showed the expected deficits on gestural imitation, but were significantly better than the normally developing infants on the Meltzoff tasks. The implications of these results for a number of theoretical issues are discussed.

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Past research demonstrated that newborns looked longer at live faces and two-dimensional still images of the mother than at the faces and images of strangers (Bushnell, Sai, & Mullin, 1989; Field, Cohen, Garcia, & Greenberg, 1985; Walton, Bower, & Bower, 1992). This study examined schema (prototype) theory as a basis for newborn's preference for the mother's face by creating composite (prototype) faces with a pixel averaging technique. Results obtained with a preferential operant-sucking procedure indicated that formation of a representation of faces was rapid. Newborns preferred to look at a composite of presented faces rather than a composite of unseen faces on the first-look presentation of each. The effect faded over the duration of the experiment.