**5. Social reasoning**

Adaptive functioning includes social reasoning, or a child's ability to engage in social interactions. ASD is characterized by major difficulties in this domain, ranging from attending to irrelevant features of social situations (e.g., Dawson, Meltzoff, Osterling, Rinaldi, & Brown, 1998; Klin, Jones, Schultz, Volkmar & Cohen 2002), giving atypical responses to social cues (e.g., Kjelgaard & Tager-Flusberg, 2001; Mottron, 2004; Mundy, Sigman & Kasari, 1990; Parish-Morris et al., 2007; Sigman & Ruskin, 1999; Stone, Ousley, Yoder, Hogan, & Hepburn 1997), having difficulty understanding the intentions of others (e.g., Baron-Cohen, 1995; Preissler & Carey, 2005; Warreyn, Roeyers, Oelbrandt, & De Groote 2005), and poor imitation skills (e.g., Hobson & Lee, 1999; Loveland, Tunali-Kotoski, Pearson, Brelsford, Ortegon, & Chen 1994). Here we describe findings for two of these areas, namely joint attention (i.e., the act of sharing another's attentional focus) and of theory of mind (i.e., the understanding of others' intentions).
