Autistic children have a significant lower performance on false belief task compared to other cognitive tasks for testing intelligence and language capacities. Mental states such as beliefs are theoretical entities, the posits of this theory. These radical changes of paradigm make a theory at a certain stage incommensurable with its earlier stages. According to this view, it is possible to infer other people s intentions and future actions by using our own mind as a model for theirs. A series of experiments has investigated self-ascription of beliefs in order to check whether children were better psychologists of their own mental states than of others .
Children are no more reliable about their own mental states than they are about others .
This seems to suggest that our own mind is not a better model for mental life than others . Autism is one of the most severe psychiatric impairment that can occur during the early stages of development. They adapted the false belief task to autistic children and ran experiments with a control group of Down children. Although autistic children had better cognitive performance than Down children in many cognitive tasks, they massively failed the false belief task. Furthermore, the amount of successful performance didn t increase significantly with age.