High-functioning autism (ASD) is characterized by real-life difficulties in social interaction; however, these individuals often succeed on laboratory tests that require an understanding of another person's beliefs and intentions. This paradox suggests a theory of mind (ToM) deficit in adults with ASD that has yet to be demonstrated in an experimental task eliciting ToM judgments. We tested whether ASD adults would show atypical moral judgments when they need to consider both the intentions (based on ToM) and outcomes of a person's actions. In experiment 1, ASD and neurotypical (NT) participants performed a ToM task designed to test false belief understanding. In experiment 2, the same ASD participants and a new group of NT participants judged the moral permissibility of actions, in a 2 (intention: neutral/negative) × 2 (outcome: neutral/negative) design. Though there was no difference between groups on the false belief task, there was a selective difference in the moral judgment task for judgments of accidental harms, but not neutral acts, attempted harms, or intentional harms. Unlike the NT group, which judged accidental harms less morally wrong than attempted harms, the ASD group did not reliably judge accidental and attempted harms as morally different. In judging accidental harms, ASD participants appeared to show an underreliance on information about a person's innocent intention and, as a direct result, an overreliance on the action's negative outcome. These findings reveal impairments in integrating mental state information (e.g., beliefs, intentions) for moral judgment.

The current study examines the effect of violations of social expectancies on the neural substrates of person perception. In an event-related fMRI experiment, participants were presented with the photographs of either Republican or Democrat politicians paired with either typical Republican or Democrat political views (e.g., "wants a smaller government" or "wants liberal supreme court judges"). Subjects were asked to form an impression of the targets using information about both their political affiliation and their political views. Of interest was the contrast between stereotypically congruent trials and stereotypically incongruent trials. The results reveal that brain regions previously involved in mentalizing (i.e., temporoparietal junction and medial prefrontal cortex) are preferentially recruited when viewing incongruent social targets.Key words: person perception; expectancy violation; mentalizing; individuation, fMRI 3The ubiquitous use of social expectations when perceiving others is well established. Social cognitive investigations have repeatedly demonstrated how impression formation based on categories and stereotypes (i.e., information that is expected to describe social targets belonging to a specific social group) often take precedence over construal based on individuating information (i.e., information that is specific to a social target) (Devine, 1989; Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2001). Nevertheless, social expectations are often violated during impression formation (Hamilton, Driscoll, & Worth, 1989;Hastie & Kumar, 1979;Macrae, Bodenhausen, Schloerscheidt, & Milne, 1999;Sherman, Bessenoff, & Frost, 1998). As a consequence, we routinely are required to override our social expectations and instead create individuated impressions of others.The implementation of such individuation processes following the violations of social expectations has been extensively documented (Brewer, 1988;Fiske & Neuberg, 1990;Macrae et al., 1999;Hastie & Kumar, 1979;Srull & Wyer, 1989). When individuated, social targets are construed as complex social agents with their personal constellation of beliefs, personality characteristics and intentions, as opposed to stereotypical members of a particular social group. Individuation, therefore, requires the attribution of unique characteristics, such as intentions and mental states, to social targets. to an individual for which pre-existing expectations are not applicable (Brewer, 1988;Fiske & Neuberg, 1990;Macrae et al., 1999). METHODS ParticipantsTwenty participants were recruited from the local MIT community. Of these twenty participants, two were excluded from subsequent analyses (the first subject excluded reported discomfort during the scan and difficulty performing the task, the second subject was the only one to report identification with the 7 Republican party). The remaining eighteen were between the ages of 19 and 30 years (9 male, mean age = 20.7 years), reported no significant abnormal neurological history and had normal or corrected-to-normal visual acuity. Six...

Models of reading must explain how orthographic input activates a phonological representation, and elicits the retrieval of word meaning from semantic memory. Comparisons between tasks that theoretically differ with respect to the degree to which they rely on connections between orthographic, phonological and semantic systems during reading can thus provide valuable insight into models of reading, but such direct comparisons are not well-represented in the literature. An ALE meta-analysis explored lexicality effects directly contrasting words and pseudowords using the lexical decision task and overt or covert naming, which we assume rely most on the semantic and phonological systems, respectively. Interactions between task and lexicality effects demonstrate that different demands of the lexical decision and naming tasks lead to different manifestations of lexicality effects.

Memory for the context in which items were previously encountered is necessary for everyday tasks. Recollection of item-context associations can facilitate search and support earlier viewing of recognition targets. We used fixation-by-fixation analysis of viewing behavior to characterize visual fixations influenced by recollection during associative recognition. We computed the (1) aggregate proportion of viewing time on target and (2) saccades within target per fixation during recognition testing to measure the influence of recollection on viewing behavior. Proportion of viewing time on target and number of saccades within target increased after the initial fixation of recognition test. These results indicate that recollection effects occurred immediately after the initial fixation of visual associative recognition and that early, prolonged fixations and saccades within selected faces could represent a precise behavioral correlate of recollection memory.