Photographic cues do not always facilitate performance on false belief tasks in children with autism

Previous studies have indicated that a pictorial representation of a prior belief can help 3-year-old children (Mitchell & Lacohee, 1991) as well as children with autism (Charman & Lynggaard, 1998) to pass false belief tasks that used the deceptive box or "Smarties" paradigm. The studies reported here attempted to replicate these findings using the unexpected transfer or "Sally-Anne" paradigm, which requires children to predict the actions of a protagonist on the basis of a false belief. Results showed no facilitative effect on "Sally-Anne" task performance for the children with autism or for comparison children of either representational or nonrepresentational cues. This effect was found even in children who benefited from the intervention with the deceptive box paradigm. The findings raise issues regarding the way false belief tasks are conceptualized by experimenters and the demands different false belief paradigms make on children.