Cognition and Perception

In this Topic, we discuss the development of cognition and perception in the child. In the first section, we discuss perception, the ability to acquire information about the world. The child's ability to distinguish different visual and auditory stimuli, as well as stimuli in all the rest of the senses, develops rapidly over the course of the first two years. While some of this development is passive, the majority of it depends on the child's …

… of puberty. Some children, however, are severely impaired on these tasks throughout their lives. Children with autism, for example, are often as intelligent as children with other forms of mental retardation when measured by standard IQ tests, but they are much worse at the false belief, appearance-reality, and metacognitive tasks described above. Some have argued that this failure in theory of mind lies at the root of autistic deficits in language, communication, and empathy.