summary, the incidence of autistic features among the Romanian adoptees stud- ied by Rutter and his colleagues is sufficiently elevated for this pattern of behavior to be linked to severe privation in early childhood and atypical development of attachment relationships. The conditions of care among congenitally blind children who succumb to autism are much better by comparison. Nonetheless, they may also be considered to be deprived of the early experiences afforded by social interaction for sharing the perspectives of another person. Such sharing of experience through joint attention, as we have seen, may be a critical precursor ofTOM and subsequent social relationships, as well as language development. Privation of such experiences will have even more significant consequences when children also have additional handicaps, such as those associated with low IQ. Importantly, however, in both the Romanian adoptees and the blind children, the autistic behaviors were short lived and the progress of these children was better than normally predicted in autism. Together these findings suggest that the behavioral profile of these children might be considered a "phenocopy" of autism but with a different etiology to ordinary