Dissociable Effects of Social and Non-Social Autistic Traits on Figure Disembedding and Mental Rotation in Women and Men

Abstract

Recent data revealed dissociations between social and non-social domains both in autism and neurotypical population. In the present study, we investigated whether specific visuospatial abilities, as mental rotation and figure disembedding, are differently related to social and non-social autistic traits, also considering sex differences in dealing with visuospatial tasks. University students (N = 426) completed the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ), mental rotation of two-dimensional figures and figure disembedding tasks. A two-factor model of AQ was used to differentiate social and non-social autistic traits. Mental rotation was affected by a significant interaction between sex, social and non-social traits. This implies that, when non-social traits were above the mean (+ 1 SD), no sex differences in mental rotation were found, whereas, below this value, sex differences depended on the social traits, with men outperforming women at middle-to-high social traits, and with a comparable performance, or even with women outperforming men, at lower social traits. Instead, only a small positive correlation between figure disembedding and social traits was observed in the overall sample. These results are interpreted using the hyper-systemizing framework of autism and contribute to the debate on individual differences in the cognitive style of autistic people and neurotypical people with autistic traits.