Abstract
This study examined whether school-aged autistic children without co-occurring intellectual disabilities (autisticWoID) show similar difficulty on Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks as young autisticWoID children and if these difficulties are related to problems in domain-general aspects of cognition. Eighty-one autisticWoID and 44 neurotypical (NT) children between the ages of 8–16 years participated in this study and were matched on verbal IQ. ToM performance significantly and independently differentiated many, but not all, autisticWoID and NT participants above and beyond the effects of working memory and inferential thinking. However, these cognitive variables did not fully explain difficulties with social cognition in autisticWoID children. These findings have implications for understanding autism, the factors that may impact intervention for social cognition in autism, and the factors that impact the education of autistic children who may struggle in general education classrooms.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by Institute for Educational Sciences Grant IES R324A120168 and the UC Davis Department of Psychiatry Lisa Capps Endowment for Research on Education and Neurodevelopmental Disorders.
Funding
The research reported in this paper was supported by IES Grant # IES R324A120168, and the UC Davis Department of Psychiatry Lisa Capps Endowment for Research on Education and Neurodevelopmental Disorders.
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AS contributed to conceptualization, formal analysis, writing—original draft, review & editing, visualization. JCB contributed to supervision, formal analysis, writing—review & editing. NM and MCZ contributed to methodology, investigation, writing—review & editing. PM contributed to conceptualization, supervision, funding acquisition, methodology, writing—review & editing.
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Santini, A., Bullen, J.C., Zajic, M.C. et al. Brief Report: The Factors Associated with Social Cognition in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. J Autism Dev Disord (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-022-05794-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-022-05794-7