Social-cognitive abilities in children with lesser variants of autism: skill deficits or failure to apply skills?

The present study re-examined the ability of children with lesser variants of autism (classified as PDD-NOS) to infer emotions of other people and to describe others in terms of inner, psychological characteristics. It also explores the hypothesis that these children may have the skill to infer mental states of other people, but fail to use these skills spontaneously. Children with lesser variants of autism and normal control children matched for age, sex and intelligence were given three structured emotional role-taking tasks and asked to give two spontaneous descriptions of peers. The results showed that both groups did not differ with respect to their ability to infer other people's emotions in the structured role-taking tasks. In contrast, significant differences were found on the free person descriptions: the children with PDD-NOS used fewer inner, psychological characteristics to describe peers.