Hobson R P
J Autism Dev Disord. 1984 Mar;14(1):85-104. doi: 10.1007/BF02408558.
An individual's social competence is often considered in terms of his role-taking abilities. In the light of studies by Piaget, it has been supposed that a child's developing capacity to appreciate the viewpoints of others in a social context is reflected in his ability to recognize points of view in a visuospatial setting. If this is valid, then visuospatial role-taking tasks may afford a measure of some relatively "cognitive" component of the capacity to engage in social behavior. Tasks in which subjects were required to make judgments about different and yet related views of a three-dimensional scene or object, together with tests of operational thinking, were presented to normal children and to subjects with the diagnosis of infantile autism. The results indicate that autistic children are not more impaired in their recognition of visuospatial perspectives than are normal children of comparable intellectual level in tests of operational thinking. A further, more limited study yielded suggestive evidence that over this series of tasks, autistic children perform as well as subjects with Down's syndrome who have a similar verbal mental age. These findings render it improbable that autistic children are especially "egocentric" in their appreciation of visuospatial perspectives.
一个人的社会能力通常根据其角色采择能力来考量。根据皮亚杰的研究，人们认为儿童在社会情境中理解他人观点的发展能力体现在其在视觉空间环境中识别观点的能力上。如果这是正确的，那么视觉空间角色采择任务或许可以衡量参与社会行为能力中一些相对“认知”的成分。要求受试者对三维场景或物体的不同但相关的视图进行判断的任务，以及操作思维测试，被呈现给正常儿童和被诊断为婴儿自闭症的受试者。结果表明，在操作思维测试中，自闭症儿童在识别视觉空间视角方面并不比智力水平相当的正常儿童受损更严重。另一项更有限的研究得出了一些启发性证据，即在这一系列任务中，自闭症儿童的表现与具有相似语言心理年龄的唐氏综合征受试者一样好。这些发现使得自闭症儿童在理解视觉空间视角时特别“以自我为中心”的可能性不大。
