Autistic childrenÕs understanding of false belief: Studies based on computerized animation task

The first purpose of the studies reported was to compare the ability of autistic children in understanding false belief with the corresponding abilities of normal or mentally retarded children. Unexpected location tasks adapted from the SallyAnne false belief tasks were used in experiment 1. Autistic children performed worse than normal children and the mentally retarded children, but the difference in performance between the autistic and the mentally retarded children was not significant. Similar results emerged when the unexpected content tasks adapted from the Smarties tasks were used in