Social reasoning, brain growth and autism

People with autism seem to have special difficulty understanding false beliefs, but research may help understand this disorder, Canadians researchers say.

The study finds electroencephalogram recording of brain electrical activity linked how preschool children deal with the sometime discrepancy between how people think about the world and the way the world really is to brain development.

We know that specific areas of the brain are active when adults think about others’ thoughts, Mark Sabbagh of Queens College in Kingston says in a statement.

But our findings are the first to show that these specialized neural circuits are there as early as preschool years and that maturational changes in these areas are associated with preschoolers’ abilities to think about their social world in increasingly sophisticated ways.

The researchers compiled EEG results for 29 4-year-old children as they assessed whether another person’s thoughts and feelings agree with the way the world really is while engaging in a series of behavioral tasks.

The findings are published in the journal Child Development.