This article reports on a study of children's understanding of the intentions of characters in a series of stories, found in previous research to be impaired in children with autism but here investigated in 16 children with visual impairment and 16 sighted children. The children with visual impairment gave fewer correct justifications based on mental states than did the sighted children. A small subgroup, identified on the basis of their cognitive style on a reading task and predominantly children with congenital visual impairment, showed the most difficulty on this social cognition task.
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