Do animated triangles reveal a marked difficulty among autistic people with reading minds?

Abstract

This meta-analysis tested whether autistic people show a marked, isolated difficulty with mentalising when assessed using the Frith -Happé Animations, an advanced test of mentalising (or ‘theory of mind’). Effect sizes were aggregated in multivariate meta-analysis from 33 papers reporting data for over 3000 autistic and non-autistic people. Relative to non-autistic individuals, autistic people underperformed, with a small effect size on the non-mentalising control conditions and a medium effect size on the mentalising condition. This indicates that studies have reliably found mentalising to be an area of challenge for autistic people, although the group differences were not large. It remains to be seen how important mentalising difficulties are in accounting for the social difficulties diagnostic of autism. As autistic people underperformed on the control conditions as well as the mentalising condition, it is likely that group differences on the test are partly due to domain-general information processing differences. Finally, there was evidence of publication bias, suggesting that true effects on the Frith -Happé Animations may be somewhat smaller than reported in the literature. Lay abstract Autistic people are thought to have difficulty with mentalising (our drive to track and understand the minds of other people). Mentalising is often measured by the Frith -Happé Animations task, where individuals need to interpret the interactions of abstract shapes. This review article collated results from over 3000 people to assess how autistic people performed on the task. Analysis showed that autistic people tended to underperform compared to non-autistic people on the task, although the scale of the difference was moderate rather than large. Also, autistic people showed some difficulty with the non-mentalising as well as mentalising aspects of the task. These results raise questions about the scale and specificity of mentalising difficulties in autism. It also remains unclear how well mentalising difficulties account for the social challenges diagnostic of autism.

Judging meaning: A domain-level difference between autistic and non-autistic adults

“…Autistic people performed very similarly on both the 'theory of mind' and control items, and any group differences on either set of items only represented a small effect size. This result does depart somewhat from previous research, which has on average found a medium effect size difference between autistic and non-autistic people on the 'theory of mind' items (see [38] for a meta-analysis). This difference from previous research might have been due to the online methods used in this study royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rsos R. Soc.…”

“…Certainly, among children, a study reported that differences between autistic and non-autistic groups emerged on a researcher-administered 'theory of mind' task but not a computerized version [39]. With respect to the nature of the sample, there were more women than men (unusually for autism research involving this task) and women performed significantly better than men on the Frith-Happé Animations, Cohen's d = 0.80, 95% CI [0.29, 1.31]; this may have led to smaller overall differences between autistic and non-autistic people than are typically found on the task (as reported in [38]). On the other hand, it should be noted that our study is consistent with existing research insofar as other studies also do not find a clear-cut difference between performance on the 'theory of mind' and control items of the Frith-Happé Animations among autistic people [38], even though the original study reported a considerable difference specifically on the 'theory of mind' items [40].…”

“…With respect to the nature of the sample, there were more women than men (unusually for autism research involving this task) and women performed significantly better than men on the Frith-Happé Animations, Cohen's d = 0.80, 95% CI [0.29, 1.31]; this may have led to smaller overall differences between autistic and non-autistic people than are typically found on the task (as reported in [38]). On the other hand, it should be noted that our study is consistent with existing research insofar as other studies also do not find a clear-cut difference between performance on the 'theory of mind' and control items of the Frith-Happé Animations among autistic people [38], even though the original study reported a considerable difference specifically on the 'theory of mind' items [40]. This is in line with other research that has failed to replicate a specific 'theory of mind' difficulty among autistic people and/or has questioned the construct validity of 'theory of mind' (for a review, see [9]).…”

Using game‐like animations of geometric shapes to simulate social interactions: An evaluation of group score differences

“…This finding inspired modern researchers to use the original Heider and Simmel film, or newer animations mimicking the original, to assess difficulties in social intelligence among children and adults affected by psychological conditions characterized by challenges in social functioning (e.g., autism spectrum disorder or schizophrenia; Klin, 2000;Martinez et al, 2019). These researchers discovered that typically developing individuals were generally more able to identify the social relationships between these abstract shapes as indicated by moderate, metaanalytic effect sizes across studies of adults and children (Wilson, 2021). Moreover, performance on these animated shape tasks tends to correlate positively with other ability measures of social or emotional intelligence (Johannesen et al, 2018).…”

Development of social responsiveness and theory of mind in children of parents with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder

“…To our knowledge, we are the first to study ToM in children at FHR-SZ or FHR-BP using ATT, which is an example of a more advanced ToM test (compared to e.g. false-belief tests) suggested to be a relatively pure measure of ToM not influenced by other demands ( Wilson, 2021 ), and without ceiling effects ( Bundsgaard and Bliksted, 2019 ). Nevertheless, our results indicate that 11-year-old children at FHR-SZ or FHR-BP display intact ToM at this stage.…”