Equal egocentric bias in school-aged children with and without autism spectrum disorders

Egocentric bias is a core feature of autism. This phenomenon has been studied using the false belief task. However, typically developing children who pass categorical (pass or fail) false belief tasks may still show subtle egocentric bias. We examined 7- to 13-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 76) or typical development (n = 113) using tasks with a continuous response scale: a modified false belief task and a visual hindsight bias task. All children showed robust egocentric bias on both tasks, but no group effects were found. Our large sample size, coupled with our sensitive tasks and resoundingly null group effects, indicate that children with and without ASD possess more similar egocentric tendencies than previously reported.