The basic ability to recognize intentionality via the consistent pursuit of goals has been reliably found to emerge early in typical development, but the ontogeny of intention understanding (IU) in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is less clear. Findings from research investigating goal-directed IU in children with ASD have been equivocal, in part because of the varying methodologies used across studies. Studies are relatively consistent in their findings that children with ASD are adept at understanding intention when they are simply required to attend to actions on an object. However, when children with ASD must attend to, and incorporate, social-communicative cues to draw conclusions regarding goal-directed intention, evidence of impairment emerges. This study compares both object-oriented and social-communicatively cued goal-directed IU in the same sample of children with ASD and typically-developing children. Relative to matched controls, children with ASD did not exhibit deficits in object-oriented goal-directed IU (paralleling findings from previous studies). Although children with ASD also discriminated between intended and unintended actions (i.e., accidental actions) as cued by social-communication indicators, typically-developing children exhibited significantly greater differentiation between conditions. Performance on the social-communicatively cued task was significantly related to response to joint attention. Results suggest that children with ASD have intact object-oriented goal-directed IU abilities, and are able to incorporate social-communicative cues to develop an understanding of intention. However, they appear to do so to a lesser degree than their typically-developing peers.
Read
