Autistic children and the object permanence task.

Many mentally retarded autistic children can understand the concept of object permanence, but, in comparison to developmental-age matched normal children, the behavioral strategies they employ in carrying out the Casati-Lezine Object Permanence Test are deficient and lead to failure. These deficiencies appear unrelated to interference of stereotypic or other bizarre behavior in task performance. Similar problem-solving deficiencies can be found in mentally retarded children who are not autistic, suggesting that the deficiencies themselves are less related to the social-communication deficits of autistic children, but more to the general problem-solving difficulties found in children with a lower developmental quotient. Nevertheless, the qualitative analysis of results shows a tendency in autistic children, despite their better developmental level, to use less coordinated and regular sequences to solve the task than normal or mentally retarded children.