Distinctive characteristics of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) include difficulties in social cognition and interaction. Past research suggests that social difficulties in ASD may be explained by impaired mentalising ability- that is, processes utilised to understand emotions, mental states, and inferring of behaviours (e.g. Baron-Cohen et al., 1997). The majority of research on mentalising in those with and without ASD requires participants to make a prediction about what a person will do based on knowledge of the current situation. However, mentalising also plays a role in understanding a person’s current behaviour, by predicting what kind of circumstances could have caused it (retrodiction, e.g. Goldman & Sripada, 2005).
Objectives:
The current study focused on this neglected aspect of mentalising by investigating how individuals with and without ASD interpret people’s natural reactions (facial expressions) by deducing the event that had previously occurred; and what visual information they used in order to do so. Whereas most previous studies have used artificially posed stimuli, the current study used stimuli filmed in a naturalistic social context to capture people’s genuine and somewhat subtle responses. Furthermore, dynamic as opposed to static stimuli were utilised as they provide a more realistic representation of day-to-day experiences (e.g. Klin et. al. 2002). A further strength of this method is that, rather than asking participants explicitly to deduce a mental state or emotion (where the real mental state or emotion may not be known), participants were required to deduce an event, for which we knew the objectively correct answer.
Methods:
Stimulus Development: Four scenarios (ie., Joke, Waiting, Compliments, Story) were created that were deemed to elicit a range of complex reactions, and performed by the researcher whilst neurotypical participants’ reactions were covertly filmed. Participants were told a joke in the Joke scenario whereas in the Story scenario the researcher related a series of unfortunate mishaps that she experienced earlier in the day. In the Compliments scenario, participants were bombarded with compliments while in the Waiting scenario the researcher performed irrelevant tasks during an experiment whilst the participant was kept waiting.
Main Study: 20 adolescents with ASD and 20 neurotypical comparison participants matched for age/IQ viewed a video of the experimenter acting out all four scenarios. They were then asked to judge which of the four scenarios each of the people in 40 videoclips (10 for each scenario) were responding to, whilst being eye-tracked. Participants were also asked to indicate how they would have responded should they have experienced the above mentioned scenarios themselves.
Results:
Data analyses are currently underway but early indications suggest that those with ASD were impaired at identifying some of the scenarios only.
Conclusions:
The implications of the findings for theories of autism that postulate a deficit in mentalising will be discussed.
See more of: Cognition and Behavior
See more of: Symptoms, Diagnosis & Phenotype