This paper engages with the medically established view that individuals with autism are not capable of play or being imaginative. This paper resists this idea by reflecting on psychobiographical research conducted on the life of Temple Grandin. By re-witnessing creative experiences in her life, dialogue surrounding the imaginative capacities of…

Symbolic play is a powerful vehicle for supporting emotional development and communication. It embraces all developmental capacities. This article describes how symbols are formed and how emotional themes are symbolized whereby children reveal their understanding of the world, their feelings and relationships, and how they see themselves in the…

Past research has focused on pretend play in infants with autism because it is considered an early manifestation of symbolic or imaginative thinking. Contradictory research findings have challenged the meta-representational model. The intent of this paper is to propose that pretend play is the behavioral manifestation of developing imaginative…

The DSM-V-committee has recently published proposed diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorders. We examine these criteria in some detail. We believe that the DSM-committee has overlooked a number of important issues, including social imagination, diagnosis in infancy and adulthood, and the possibility that girls and women with autism may…

This study examined the effectiveness of the Picture Me Playing intervention for increasing the play dialogue of preschool children with ASD during pretend play opportunities with typical peers. Picture Me Playing is a pictorially enhanced, script based intervention targeting character role play through a narrative vignette. A single-treatment…

Several recent studies have demonstrated a genetical overlap between autism and schizophrenia. However, at a behavioral level it remains unclear which features can validly distinguish adults with autism from an adult schizophrenia group. To this end, the present study compared 21 individuals with the autistic disorder and 21 individuals with…

Play is widely acknowledged to be an integral part of human development and children with autism often experience substantial delays in the development of play behaviors. This review updates older reviews by covering the last 10 years of research targeting functional and symbolic play in children with autism. The review differs from other reviews…

Difficulties in understanding symbolism have been documented as characteristic of autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs). In general, virtual reality (VR) environments offer a set of potential advantages for educational intervention in ASD. In particular, VR offers the advantage, for teaching pretend play and for understanding imagination, of it being…

The diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) in older children with intellectual disabilities (IDs) is challenging because of overlap in symptomatology and the high comorbidity of these disorders. On the basis of a sample of 89 older children with IDs (aged 6-15 years) referred to an ASD clinic, semistructured parent interviews were used to…

Shortcomings in A. M. Leslie's nondevelopmental, nonsocial, and restrictively cognitive account of young children's "theory of mind" and capacity to pretend are noted, and the alternative thesis that a young child's metarepresentational capacity arises from, rather than forms the basis of, an understanding that humans have mental states…

Three possibilities for the pathogenesis of childhood autism are considered. Little evidence exists for autism as a basic affective disorder, as proposed by R. P. Hobson, but growing evidence supports childhood autism as a basic cognitive disorder, as the author argues. The author's original theoretical perspectives are revised. (SLD)