Akadémiai Kiadó

The present volume attempts to integrate two streams of cognitive research which often run parallel: largely conceptual investigations on the overall framework of human cognition, and the much more empirical study of neurocognitive developmental disorders - in this case: autism. So the book is partly a conceptual analysis, exploring the issue of domain specificity and its place in cognitive theory, but it also offers a detailed summary of the phenomena of autism, and a critical evaluation of its cognitive psychological models, and, finally, presents new empirical findings on the complexity of beyond-childhood development of theory of mind ability in autism. Besides the integration and an overview of these three major themes, the novelty of the presented theses lies primarily in the comprehensiveness of the offered conceptual framework for domain-specificity, and in the empirical findings which strongly suggest that functioning theory of mind ability and non-theory-of-mind compensatory strategies co-exist in autism.