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Abstract
Evidence from typical development and neuroimaging studies suggests that level 2 visual
perspective taking - the knowledge that different people may see the same thing differently
at the same time - is a mentalising task. Thus, we would expect children with autism,
who fail typical mentalising tasks like false belief, to perform poorly on level 2
visual perspective taking as well. However, prior data on this issue are inconclusive.
We re-examined this question, testing a group of 23 young autistic children, aged
around 8years with a verbal mental age of around 4years and three groups of typical
children (n=60) ranging in age from 4 to 8years on a level 2 visual perspective task
and a closely matched mental rotation task. The results demonstrate that autistic
children have difficulty with visual perspective taking compared to a task requiring
mental rotation, relative to typical children. Furthermore, performance on the level
2 visual perspective taking task correlated with theory of mind performance. These
findings resolve discrepancies in previous studies of visual perspective taking in
autism, and demonstrate that level 2 visual perspective taking is a mentalising task.