Previous studies have found a subgroup of people with autism or Asperger Syndrome who pass second-order tests of theory of mind. However, such tests have a ceiling in developmental terms corresponding to a mental age of about 6 years. It is therefore impossible to say if such individuals are intact or impaired in their theory of mind skills. We report the performance of very high functioning adults with autism or Asperger Syndrome on an adult test of theory of mind ability. The task involved inferring the mental state of a person just from the information in photographs of a person's eyes. Relative to age-matched normal controls and a clinical control group (adults with Tourette Syndrome), the group with autism and Asperger Syndrome were significantly impaired on this task. The autism and Asperger Syndrome sample was also impaired on Happé's strange stories tasks. In contrast, they were unimpaired on two control tasks: recognising gender from the eye region of the face, and recognising basic emotions from the whole face. This provides evidence for subtle mindreading deficits in very high functioning individuals on the autistic continuum.

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Previous work suggests children with autism show superior performance (in relation to their general mental age) on the Embedded Figures Test (EFT). Frith interprets this as showing that they have "weak central coherence". In Experiment 1, using an adult level version of this task, we aimed to replicate and extend this finding, first, by collecting response time (RT) data; second, by testing adults with autism of normal intelligence; and third, by testing a group of adults with Asperger syndrome, in order to test for differences between autism and Asperger syndrome. Both clinical groups were significantly faster on the EFT. In Experiment 2, we investigated if this difference was due to a preference for local over global processing, using a novel drawing task based on the classical Rey Figure. The clinical groups did not differ significantly on this test, but there was a trend towards such a difference. Alternative explanations for the EFT superiority in autism and Asperger syndrome are considered.

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The results suggest that individuals on the autism spectrum have impaired global coherence. Arranging sentences and making global inferences correlated highly, suggesting that central coherence may be a unitary force in these different tasks. Of the two clinical groups, the autism group had the greater deficit. The effect that such a deficit would have on one's daily life is discussed, along with possible explanations for the clinical groups' greater difficulty, and suggestions for future research.