This study examined the ability of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to generate joint intention‐based action prediction in a joint action task. Children were presented with a series of videos in which two actors either played with blocks based on joint intention (social condition) or played with blocks independently (nonsocial condition). In the familiarization stage, two actors demonstrated how they played with blocks three times. In the test stage, one actor left the scene, and another actor grasped a block and asked where she should place it. Children's gaze behavior was assessed by an eye tracker. After watching videos, children were asked to answer two questions: an action prediction question and an intention understanding question. The results showed that in the implicit eye movement task, children with ASD and typically developing (TD) children exhibited location‐based anticipatory gaze under both conditions. However, in terms of explicit behavioral responses, TD children showed higher accuracy in response to action prediction questions and intention understanding questions than children with ASD in the social condition, while no significant group difference was found in the nonsocial condition. These results indicate that children with ASD have difficulty understanding joint intention and that their action prediction is primarily driven by bottom‐up sensory inputs.

The bodily expressive action stimulus test (BEAST) is developed to provide a set of standardized emotional stimuli for experimental investigations of emotion and attention, and the consistency has been validated in adult populations abroad. However, the consistency of this test in the Chinese population is unclear. To this end, 42 images of each category of emotion (happiness, sadness, fear, and anger) were selected from 254 images of the original stimulus set to further examine the consistency of the BEAST in Chinese population. Thirty‐one Chinese college students and 41 Chinese preschool children participated in this study. All of them were asked to complete an emotion recognition and judgment task. Results showed that adults had a high degree of consistency in rating these pictures, while the children's consistency was at a medium level. For adults, sadness was the easiest to recognize, followed by fear and anger, while happiness was the hardest to recognize. For children, fear was the easiest to recognize, anger and sadness were second, and happiness was also the hardest to recognize. At the same time, adults were more accurate in identifying happiness and sadness than children. For adults, they were more likely to confuse positive emotions with negative emotions. They tended to mistake sadness, fear, and anger for happiness. For children, they were more likely to identify sadness as fear and happiness. They also tended to recognize anger as fear. These results indicate that the recognition performance of BEAST images for Chinese and Western adults are roughly the same, however, in the same cultural context, the recognition performance of adults and children are very different, and generally the recognition accuracy rate of adults is higher than that of children.