ABSTRACT
If we make advances in understanding how autism aects development, then this knowledge will be of tremendous value when designing programmes of intervention to promote socialisation and cognition. Over the past decades, researchers have strived to explain the cognitive basis of autism and three theories stand out: the theory-of-mind hypothesis, the theory of executive dysfunction and the theory of weak central coherence (Rajendran & Mitchell, 2007). The champions of these various theories are united in the quest to identify the core cognitive impairment. Take, for example, the theory-of-mind hypothesis: the authors of this account believe that autism is explained as a basic cognitive decit in mentalising – an inability to calculate what another person is thinking (Baron-Cohen, 1995). Such inability reputedly creates a barrier to predicting and explaining how another person will behave; and it also presents an obstacle to understanding how another person feels. This central decit supposedly explains the features of autism, with the implication that if we could remedy the impaired theory of mind, then perhaps autism would be cured (e.g. Hadwin, Baron-Cohen, Howlin, & Hill, 1996). The other theories similarly seek to explain autism as a core cognitive decit (but of a dierent kind).
