Department of Psychology, Centre for Research in Human Development, Lancaster University, UK.
Br J Dev Psychol. 2010 Sep;28(Pt 3):627-41. doi: 10.1348/026151009x465362.
A large body of autism research over the last 20 years has shown that people with autism have difficulties understanding mental states. This has been conceived of as a metarepresentational deficit. An open question is whether people with autism's metarepresentational deficit is limited to the mental domain. This research explores individuals with autism's understanding of the representational nature of pictures. With the use of ambiguous figures, where a single stimulus is capable of representing two distinct referents, we compared metarepresentational abilities in the pictorial and mental domains and the perception of pictorial ambiguity. Our findings indicate that individuals with autism are impaired in mental metarepresentation but not in pictorial metarepresentation. These findings suggest that children with autism understand the representational nature of pictures. We conclude that children with autism's understanding of the representational nature of pictures is in advance of their metarepresentational understanding of mind. Their perception of figure ambiguity is comparable to the typical population.
过去 20 年来，大量自闭症研究表明，自闭症患者在理解心理状态方面存在困难。这被认为是一种元表现缺陷。一个悬而未决的问题是，自闭症患者的元表现缺陷是否仅限于心理领域。这项研究探讨了自闭症患者对图片表象性质的理解。我们使用了模棱两可的图像，即一个单一的刺激能够代表两个不同的参照，我们比较了心理和图片领域的元表现能力以及对图片歧义的感知。我们的发现表明，自闭症患者在心理元表现方面存在障碍，但在图片元表现方面没有障碍。这些发现表明，自闭症儿童理解图片的表象性质。我们得出的结论是，自闭症儿童对图片表象性质的理解先于他们对心理的元表现理解。他们对图形歧义的感知与典型人群相当。
