Abstract

The theory-of-mind account of autism has been central to cognitive research in the field for nearly 40 years. It initially proposed that the diversity of symptoms in autism could derive from a deficit in the ability of autistic people to infer other individuals’ mental representations. An extraordinary amount of research has been carried out within or questioning this perspective, including numerous and different tasks that assess first-order, second-order, and advanced theory of mind. We review and describe in detail some of the more prominent studies in the field. We also explore two of the main challenges to this theory, namely the research highlighting the role of executive function and language development as alternative explanations of autistics’ performance on experimental theory-of-mind tasks. But all these accounts tend to focus on the limitations of the person with autism, ignoring the way they respond to and adapt to a world organized around the viewpoints of people without autism, and how that context functions in response to them. Recent studies into camouflaging and compensation, and hypotheses like the double-deficit model, further expand the field in this direction.