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Imitation of Intentional and Accidental Actions by Children with Autism

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Abstract

To determine whether children with autism (CWA) would selectively imitate intentional, as opposed to accidental actions, an experimenter demonstrated either an “intentional” and an “accidental” action or two “intentional” actions on the same toy [Carpenter, Akhtar, & Tomasello (1998a) Infant Behavior and Development, 21, 315–330]. CWA tended to imitate the experimenter exactly. Children with developmental delay and older typically developing children (TD) reproduced only the intentional action as often as they imitated the experimenter exactly. Younger TD mostly produced only the intentional action. It is concluded that, contrary to comparison groups, the CWA did not show an appreciation of the model’s intentions. Results are discussed in terms of theories of social cognition.

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Notes

  1. In response to reviews of an earlier version of this manuscript, we mailed follow-up questionnaires to obtain further descriptions of our sample. In addition to demographics, we also asked parents to complete the Social Communication Questionnaire—Lifetime Version (SCQ; Berument, Rutter, Lord, Pickles, & Bailey, 1999). This questionnaire contains 40 yes–no questions about the child’s lifetime presence of social-communication skills and autism symptoms. It shows high agreement with the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule and the Autism Diagnostic Inventory (Berument et al., 1999). Our response rates were 41, 67, 30 and 86% for the CWA, DD, Older TD and Younger TD groups, respectively. The demographics within the groups for those who replied mirrored the demographics of the overall sample. The SCQ data indicated that the autism sample scored within the autism cut-off, while the other three samples did not (Ms = 18, 9, 4, 5 for the CWA, DD, Older TD and Younger TD groups, respectively, F(3, 25) = 16.34, P < 0.001, η2 = 0.66).

  2. Technical problems interfered with the recording of one child with autism and one child with developmental delay. In these cases, E2 recorded the child’s response live.

  3. To ensure that there were no differences between those who completed the PLS and those who did not, all analyses were run with completion status as a factor. Interpretation of results did not change.

  4. Technical difficulties resulted in one DD and older TD child missing data for analyses comparing percentage correct on first toy versus last toy and the same DD and one younger TD child missing data for percentage of accidents performed on the first toy verus last toy where accidents were modelled. Details are available from the authors.

  5. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to us.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a grant from the Medical Research Fund of New Brunswick granted to B. D’Entremont. Parts of these data were presented at the International Meeting For Autism Research in Boston, 2005. We wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions to an earlier draft of the manuscript. We would like to acknowledge A. Foster, S. Jefferson, T. Bolivar, M. Simmering, P. Ruttle, M. Gill, S. Cohoon, N. Larade and J. Graham for assistance with data collection, coding and reliability analyses. Special thanks to the parents and children who took part in the study.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of New Brunswick, Bag Service #45444, E3B 6E4, Fredericton, NB, Canada

    Barbara D’Entremont & Aimée Yazbek

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  1. Barbara D’Entremont
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Correspondence to Barbara D’Entremont.

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D’Entremont, B., Yazbek, A. Imitation of Intentional and Accidental Actions by Children with Autism. J Autism Dev Disord 37, 1665–1678 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-006-0291-y

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