Wu, Ruihan;
Lim, Jing Tian;
Ahmed, Zahra;
Berger, Rachael;
Acem, Ensar;
Chowdhury, Ishita;
White, Sarah J;
(2024)
Do autistic adults spontaneously reason about belief? A detailed exploration of alternative explanations.
Royal Society Open Science
, 11
(7)
, Article 231889. 10.1098/rsos.231889.
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Abstract
Southgate et al.’s (Southgate 2007 Psychol. Sci. 18, 587-92 (doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01944.x)) anticipatory-looking paradigm has presented exciting yet inconclusive evidence surrounding spontaneous mentalizing in autism. The present study aimed to develop this paradigm to address alternative explanations for the lack of predictive eye movements on false-belief tasks by autistic adults. This was achieved through implementing a multi-trial design with matched true-belief conditions, and both high and low inhibitory demand false-belief conditions. We also sought to inspect if any group differences were related to group-specific patterns of attention on key events. Autistic adults were compared with non-autistic adults on this adapted implicit mentalizing task and an established explicit task. The two groups performed equally well in the explicit task; however, autistic adults did not show anticipatory-looking behaviour in the false-belief trials of the implicit task. Critically, both groups showed the same attentional distribution in the implicit task prior to action prediction, indicating that autistic adults process information from social cues in the same way as non-autistic adults, but this information is not then used to update mental representations. Our findings further document that many autistic people struggle to spontaneously mentalize others’ beliefs, and this non-verbal paradigm holds promise for use with a wide range of ages and abilities.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Do autistic adults spontaneously reason about belief? A detailed exploration of alternative explanations |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1098/rsos.231889 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.231889 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
| Keywords: | Autism, spontaneous mentalizing, eye-tracking, false-belief |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10218218 |
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