A mathematician, a physicist and a computer scientist with Asperger syndrome: Performance on folk psychology and folk physics tests

We describe three cases of very-high-functioning individuals with Asperger syndrome, two of whom are university students (in physics and computer science, respectively), and the third a professor of mathematics, and winner of the Field Medal (equivalent to the Nobel Prize). The interest in these cases is whether there is a social-cognitive deficit, given their self-evident academic achievements. Such cases provide a rare opportunity to test for dissociations of cognitive skills, since these cases possess exceptionally high ability. These three individuals were given one test of folk psychology, one test of folk physics and one test of executive function. All three cases showed deficits on the adult-level 'theory of mind' (folk psychology) test involving reading mental states from photographs of the eyes, whilst showing no deficits on a control task of judging gender from the same photographs. In addition, all three cases were at ceiling on the test of folk physics and on the most complex test of executive function (the Tower of Hanoi), Fourteen control subjects clarified normative performance on the folk psychology and folk physics tests. These results strongly suggest that theory of mind (folk psychology) is independent of IQ, executive function and reasoning about the physical world.