Autism does not limit strategic thinking in the “beauty contest” game

Abstract

A popular hypothesis in developmental psychology is that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have a specific impairment or developmental delay in their ability to reason about other people’s mental processes, especially when this reasoning process is of a higher-order, recursive, or nested variety. One type of interpersonal interaction that involves this sort of complex reasoning about others’ minds is an economic game, and because economic games have been extensively modeled in behavioral economics, they provide a unique testbed for a quantitative and precise analysis of cognitive functioning in ASD. This study specifically asked whether ASD is associated with strategic depth in the economic game known as The Beauty Contest, in which all players submit a number from 0 to 100, and the winner is the player who submits the number closest to 2/3 of the mean of all numbers submitted. Unexpectedly, the distribution of responses among adult participants with ASD reflected a level of strategic reasoning at least as deep as that of their neurotypical peers, with the same proportion of participants with ASD being characterized as “higher order” strategic players. Thus, whatever mentalistic reasoning abilities are necessary for typical performance in the context of this economic game appear to be largely intact, and therefore unlikely to be fundamental to persistent social dysfunction in ASD.

Social Decision Making in Autistic Adolescents: The Role of Theory of Mind, Executive Functioning and Emotion Regulation

“…trust, Prisoner's Dilemma, Dictator) that have been used with autistic individuals. In general, such prior research has noted relative similarity in decisions made across autistic and non-autistic people (Chiu et al, 2008;Downs & Smith 2004;Edmiston et al, 2015;Li, Zhu & Gummerum, 2014;Sally & Hill, 2006;Schmitz et al, 2015;Tayama, Tateno, Park, Ukai, Hashimoto & Saito, 2012); and that autistic individuals can make social decisions that depend on a high level of theory of mind skill (also supported Pantelis & Kennedy, 2017). In contrast, the present findings show a clear reduction of fair offers proposed by autistic individuals, which was associated with poorer theory of mind.…”

“…In economic games in which participants can decide to cooperate with a social partner to differing degrees, decisions about cooperation appear to be broadly similar in autistic and nonautistic individuals (Chiu et al, 2008;Downs & Smith, 2004;Edmiston et al, 2015;Yoshida, Dziobek, Kliemann, Heekeren, Friston & Dolan, 2010;Sally & Hill, 2006;Schmitz, Banerjee, Pouw, Stockmann & Rieffe, 2015). And autistic individuals are capable of making decisions that rely on high order theory of mind (Pantelis & Kennedy, 2017). However, autistic individuals evidence altered neural activity linked to their decisions in economic games, in brain networks involved in theory of mind and related social cognitive processes (Chiu et al, 2008;Edmiston, Merkle & Corbett, 2015).…”

A review of neuroeconomic gameplay in psychiatric disorders

“…One study has reported that children with ASD accept more unfair initial Ultimatum Game offers and reject more fair offers, perhaps because they do not recognise the other’s unfair or generous intent [75]. Interestingly, several studies have shown no abnormalities in neuroeconomic gameplay behaviour in people with ASD: performance was similar to controls when acting as the Proposer in the Ultimatum and Dictator Games [75], and in the Prisoner’s Dilemma [75–77], Trust Game [78] and Beauty Contest Game (where individuals must guess what others are thinking) [79]. However, there is some evidence that symptoms of ASD relate to performance on these games, again supporting the use of RDoC criteria to describe psychiatric disorders in terms of observable behaviours rather than diagnoses.…”

The social neuroscience of mentalizing: challenges and recommendations

“…In one study, individuals with autism showed difficulties inferring others’ strategies [69], affecting their own optimal behavior in a game context. A different study, however, found no such strategic impairments during an economic game in autism [70].…”