Images and Language

Abstract

Whenever we are confronted with mental impairment in children, as for instance in autism, the most outstanding feature is that there is a general reduction of competence. However, as it is neither very illuminating nor profitable to come up repeatedly with the finding that children who are ill do less well than children who are not, the experimental psychologist is obliged to develop alternative approaches. A strategy which we have adopted is to look for communalities and dissimilarities in the cognitive processes of different diagnostic groups of children. Thus we do not adopt a distinct disease concept, but rather seek to establish how groups of children whose pathology is quite different will respond to situations and tasks which are defined in terms of certain specific underlying mental operations.