Autism is a devastating development disorder affecting at least one in a hundred of children and adults. Although with a strong biological genetic component, diagnosis of autism is still made by behavioral criteria: qualitative impairments in social and communicative development, with restricted and repetitive activities and interests. It is not difficult to find things that people with autism have difficulty with, most autistic people also have general learning difficulties and low IQ. However, we should explore on what autistic people are good at. Thus, we could make use of their unique cognitive style to discover the unrevealed talent or to develop the specific skills.
Much progress has been made in the last 15 years to understand the preserved and impaired abilities in autism, including nature of social and communicative handicaps in autism. Primary in this is the notion of the Theory of mind. Theory of Mind is the ability to attribute mental states, beliefs, desires, emotions, knowledge to oneself , and to others. In another term, mentalization. Autistic children have such difficulty to understand deception, pretend play and even telling lies. A hypothesis was tested using Wimmer and Perner's puppet play paradigm by Uta Frith, the result shows that even though the mental age of the autistic children was higher that those with Down's syndrome, they
failed to impute beliefs to others. Hence, it is proven that this dysfunction is independent of mental retardation and specific to autism.
Besides, autistic
Much progress has been made in the last 15 years to understand the preserved and impaired abilities in autism, including nature of social and communicative handicaps in autism. Primary in this is the notion of the Theory of mind. Theory of Mind is the ability to attribute mental states, beliefs, desires, emotions, knowledge to oneself , and to others. In another term, mentalization. Autistic children have such difficulty to understand deception, pretend play and even telling lies. A hypothesis was tested using Wimmer and Perner's puppet play paradigm by Uta Frith, the result shows that even though the mental age of the autistic children was higher that those with Down's syndrome, they
failed to impute beliefs to others. Hence, it is proven that this dysfunction is independent of mental retardation and specific to autism.
Besides, autistic
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