ABSTRACT
Updated accounts of social cognitive development situate false-belief task success within a more complex developmental trajectory. This incorporates both early examples of Theory of Mind, such as implicit belief tracking and desire reasoning, and related behaviours such as joint attention and emotion recognition. Theoretical accounts of autism interpret the early, small disruptions to the typical developmental process as having larger downstream effects, which are eventually recognisable as autism. The main method adopted to try to identify the earliest signs of autism was retrospective parental report and video analysis. There are a number of theoretical accounts that make predictions about where such a marker might be found. The first of these is the social orienting hypothesis, which predicts that the earliest signs of autism should be a lack of preferential attention to social content in the world. The social motivation hypothesis suggests that the child’s lack of speech may reflect a lack of motivation to engage with others.
