Table 4.

Studies Demonstrating That Autistic People of All Ages Skillfully Understand Other Persons’ Intentions, Goals, and Desires

Study	Measure	Empirical finding
Aldridge, Stone, Sweeney, and Bower (2000)	Nonverbal behavior	Young, preverbal autistic children understand other people’s intentions “significantly better than the normally developing” children (p. 294).
Colombi et al. (2009)	Nonverbal behavior	Autistic preschool-age children understand other people’s intentions, a finding that “does not easily mesh with the line of reasoning” that claims autistic people have “deficits in the understanding of others’ mental states” (p. 157).
Carpenter, Pennington, and Rogers (2001)	Nonverbal behavior	Autistic pre-school-age children are not deficient “on any measure involving the understanding of others’ intentions” (p. 589).
Liebal, Colombi, Rogers, Warneken, and Tomasello (2008)	Nonverbal behavior	Autistic pre-school-age children “not only can understand another person’s goal,” but they are motivated to “help [that person] with that goal” (p. 229).
Falck-Ytter (2010)	Eye-tracking	Autistic pre-school-age children accurately “predict other people’s action goals” in ways that are “strikingly similar” to nonautistic preschoolers (p. 376).
Berger and Ingersoll (2014)	Nonverbal behavior	Autistic pre-school-age children “are able to use social-communicative cues [experimenter’s facial expressions] to understand intention” (p. 3204).
Fitzpatrick et al. (2013)	Nonverbal behavior	Autistic pre-school and early grade-school-age children “have the ability to understand intentions” and are “equivalent to typically developing children” on “social coordination tests” (pp. 1, 3, 9).
Kerr and Durkin (2004)	Spoken free response (drawings)	Autistic pre-school-age children understand “that (i) thought bubbles represent thought, (ii) thought bubbles can be used to infer an unknown reality, (iii) thoughts can be different, and (iv) thoughts can be false” (p. 646).
Li et al. (2019)	Eye-tracking and pupillometry	Autistic pre-school- and grade-school-age children are similar to typically developing children in their “unconscious sensitivity to agents’ intentions” (p. 9).
Green et al. (2017)	Multiple choice (photos)	Autistic grade-school-age children are as adept as nonautistic grade-school-age children at “identify[ing] … mutually voluntary interactions between intentional agents” (p. 406) and are characterized by a “similar … developmental trajectory” for this skill (p. 409).
Russell and Hill (2001)	Computer game, shooting game	Autistic grade-school-age children have “intact abilities in monitoring basic actions, intact abilities in reporting an intention, both for self and for another agent, and intact ability in reporting intended actions” (p. 317)
Vivanti et al. (2011)	Eye-tracking and nonverbal behavior	Autistic grade-school-age children “(a) consider situational constraints in order to understand the logic of an agent’s action and (b) show typical usage of the agent’s emotional expressions to infer his or her intentions” (p. 841).
McAleer, Kay, Pollick, and Rutherford (2011)	Multiple choice (videos)	Autistic adults demonstrate “no failure to recognize intent… . In no combination of variables did the autistic and nonautistic participants perform in a markedly different manner” (p. 1058).
Cole, Slocombe, and Barraclough (2018)	Multiple choice (videos)	Autistic adults do not differ from nonautistic adults in “implicit mentalizing” to make “social decisions [that] required the intentions of the actors to be inferred” (p. 3, 10).
Channon, Lagnado, Fitzpatrick, Drury, and Taylor (2011)	Multiple choice (written stories)	Autistic adults demonstrate “greater differentiation than controls between intentional and unintentional actions” and “between actions that the protagonists believed to be likely versus unlikely to lead to negative consequences” (p. 1534).
Sebanz, Knoblich, Stumpf, and Prinz (2005)	Response time	Autistic adults understand the intentions of a “co-actor … showing the same pattern of results as the matched control group” (p. 433).
Forgeot d’Arc et al. (2016)	Multiple choice (videos)	Autistic adults possess the same level of “spontaneous propensity to pursue goals that others pursue” as nonautistic adults possess (p. 1).
Hubert et al. (2007)	Spoken free response (videos)	Autistic adults perform equally “well in the description of basic actions” and “subjective states” as nonautistic adults, demonstrating that in autistic adults “intentionality is therefore well perceived” (p. 1390).
Ponnet, Buysse, Roeyers, and De Corte (2005)	Covertly videotaped interaction	Autistic adults do “not differ from the control adults in the ability to infer the thoughts and feelings of their interaction partner” (p. 595).