Are children with autism superior at folk physics?

Just over ten years ago my colleagues and I asked the question "Do children with autism have a 'theory of mind'?" (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith, 1985). Using a false-belief test (Wimmer and Perner, 1983) we arrived at a prelimi­ nary answer. The majority of children with autism failed the test, which sug­ gested that they were indeed impaired in the development of a theory of mind. A theory of mind, also called a folk psychology, is the main way in which human beings are believed to make sense of actions (Carey, 1985; Dennett, 1978; Heider and Simmel, 1944). That is, attributing mental states (such as beliefs, desires, and intentions) and knowledge to actors seems to be the auto­ matic way in which we compute the causes of actions and predict future ones. John Morton and his colleagues (Morton, Frith, and Leslie, 1991) coined an incisive, succinct term for this process: mentalizxng. In the ten years since this first test of mentalizing in children with autism there have been more than thirty further experimental tests of the hypothesis, the vast majority revealing profound impairments in the development of folk psychological understanding in autistic individuals. These tests are reviewed elsewhere (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Baron-Cohen, Tager-Flusberg, and Cohen, 1993). This impairment includes deficits in understanding that seeing leads to knowing (Baron-Cohen and Goodhart , 1994), distinguishing mental from physical entities (Baron-Cohen, 1989a), and making appropriate distinctions