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Might we be Calling Problems Seen in Autism Spectrum Conditions: ‘Poor Theory of Mind,’ when Actually they are Related to Non-Generalised ‘Object Permanence’?

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Abstract

Autism spectrum conditions (ASC) and the delayed development of object permanence is often not questioned, and is rarely understood. The following paper attempts to explore this idea and suggests reasons for why such development is delayed and the possibility that certain difficult behaviours seen in children with ASC are less likely to be connected to having poor theory of mind and more connected to lacking generalized concepts of object permanence.
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... The theory of mind theory of autism fails to account for the sensory hypo-and hyper-sensitivities, restricted interests, insistence on sameness and savant skills of many autistic individuals, focusing heavily on what could be considered one half of autism's diagnostic criteria (Frith and Happé 1994). Additionally, it often fails to attend to the autistic voice, and has been criticised for being based on misunderstandings of the autistic social inference processes (Milton 2012(Milton , 2014a) and sensory differences (Lawson and Dombroski 2015). Weak central coherence theory also does not account for all findings in sensory processing. ...
... The model tries to minimise prediction error from a very flexible self-model by acting on the world to enforce the restricted environments in which that self-model effectively reduces prediction error. This would explain the particular and focused energy with which some autistic individuals engage in their chosen areas of expertise, and also the insistence on sameness and learned routines, which are highly predictable (Lawson and Dombroski 2015). As such, in the world that an autistic individual creates for themselves, if it could be perfectly controlled and isolated, this model (Fig. 3) would predict that they would be better at self-modelling than the neurotypical model in its own created environment. ...
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Autistic intelligence, autistic perception and autistic patterns of thought that we all share in different degrees - an update
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