Change in children's understanding of others' intentional actions.

The study investigated children's intention understanding using a longitudinal design. Thirty-two Italian children were tested on the 'Demonstration of Intention' in the Re-enactment paradigm devised by Meltzoff (1995a), at two ages. Mean age was 12 months at the first session and 15 months at the second session. Previous research by Meltzoff showed that 18-month-olds are able to re-enact what the adult intended to do, when an adult tried but failed to perform certain target acts. Bellagamba and Tomasello (1999) found that, compared to 18-month-olds, 12-month-olds are less able to imitate unsuccessful goal-directed actions. The current study had two main goals. The first was to replicate earlier findings on intention understanding in 12- and 15-month-olds longitudinally assessed. The second goal was to analyse which actions children perform when not producing the target act. A coding scheme was devised to evaluate these non-target actions. Results confirmed previous findings, i.e. children's tendency to produce the target act was higher at an older age. At a younger age the most frequent response was 'undifferentiated manipulation' of target objects, followed by 'approximation to the target action'. Since children differed in their intention understanding performance at the first session, we decided to check whether these individual differences remained stable at the second session. Individual children with high intention understanding performance at 12 months tended to remain high at 15 months of age.

Profiles of sensorimotor development in children with autism and with developmental delay.

Aim of the study was (1) to evaluate sensorimotor development of children with autism in comparison with that of children with developmental delay, (2) to verify the possible unevenness of the developmental profiles through correlations amongst domains and between domains and chronological age. 46 children with autism were compared with 45 children with developmental delay. Mean chronological age was 3.7 yr. in children with autism and 3.6 yr. in children with mental retardation. Mean mental age was 1.3 yr. in children with autism and 1.1 yr. in children with developmental delay. Ordinal scales of Uzgiris-Hunt show that the two groups score significantly differently on the scales of Object Permanence, Means-Ends, Operational Causality, and Spatial Relations and that scores were higher for the children with autism. The comparison made between the developmental levels of each group indicate that the sensorimotor profile in children with developmental delay is fairly homogeneous, while it appears uneven in autistic children, for whom Object Permanence appears to be the most advanced skill, Verbal and Gestural Imitation and Schemes for Relating to Objects the lowest. The results are in keeping with the assumption that the pivotal defect of autism is a deficit in social interactive skills.