The ‘seeing‐leads‐to‐knowing’ deficit in autism: The Pratt and Bryant probe

Abstract

This study retests the findings by Leslie & Frith (1988) and Perner, Frith, Leslie & Leekam (1989) that children with autism have a specific difficulty in understanding the principle that ‘seeing leads to knowing’. It extends the earlier work by including a control group of subjects with mental handicap, and by using a simpler method, derived from Pratt & Bryant (1990). Despite these modifications, a very similar result was found: while 75 per cent of the subjects with mental handicap passed this test, only 33 per cent of the subjects with autism did so. This more stringent retest suggests this result is robust.

Social deficits and interpersonal relationships in autism

“…For example, these children do not appear to understand that seeing leads to knowing [Baron-Cohen and Goodheart, 1994;Leslie and Frith, 1988;Perner et al, 1989], a fact that is grasped by typically developing children by about 3 years [Pillow, 1989]. For example, after watching an experimenter view an object in a cup, the child with autism typically answers correctly that the experimenter has seen what is in the cup.…”

Measuring Theory of Mind in Children. Psychometric Properties of the ToM Storybooks

“…Mental physical distinction (including close impostors) Wellman (1990); Wellman and Estes (1986) Steerneman et al (2002) 3 Perception knowledge Baron-Cohen and Goodhart (1994); Pratt and Bryant (1990) Tager-Flusberg (2003) 3-4 Belief resulting in action or emotion Bartsch and Wellman (1989); Wellman (1990) Therefore, for each justification question, correct answer categories are determined. They are chosen from 21 formulated justification categories; in Appendix C definitions of these categories can be found.…”

Theory of Mind Training in Children with Autism: Relating the Shared Attention Mechanism to the Theory of Mind Mechanism vs. Understanding Beliefs Training

“…However, in many aspects of our lives, our knowledge is related to our visual perception or the see-know connection (Wimmer et al, 1988). This suggests that children with autism may have an interrupted perception-knowledge relationship, which is evident in their low performance on standard see-know tasks (Lind & Bowler, 2009;Baron-Cohen & Goodhart, 1993;Leslie & Frith, 1988;Perner et al, 1989).…”