Abstract: Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder without certain pathogeny and diagnosed only on the basis of abnormal behavior. According to these behavioral characteristics, two theories were proposed to explain autism: theory of mind and executive function. However, some findings showed that autistic individuals did not fail on all kinds of tasks measuring theory of mind and executive function. So neither theory of mind nor executive function could separately interpret all the symptoms of autism. Generally speaking, autistic individuals exhibited theory of mind deficits and executive dysfunction simultaneously. In recent years, many researchers found that theory of mind correlated significantly with executive function. Nevertheless, these researches mainly focused on the relationship between false belief understanding and inhibitive abilities in preschoolers, ignoring the fact that there are many other components in theory of mind and executive function and the relationship between them may change with age. Therefore, researchers need to further explore the relations between different theory of mind tasks and different paradigms of executive function in different age. This may advance diagnosis and training of autism

Key words: autism, theory of mind, executive function