Impaired sequence generation: a preliminary comparison between high functioning autistic and neurotypical adults

Abstract

Earlier research demonstrated robust cerebellar involvement in sequencing, including high-level social information sequencing that requires mental state attributions, termed mentalizing. Earlier research also found cerebellar deficiencies in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) which are characterized by social difficulties. However, studies on high-level social sequencing functionality by persons with ASD are almost non-existent. In this study, we, therefore, perform a comparison between behavioral performances of high-functioning ASD and neurotypical participants on the Picture and Verbal Sequencing Tasks. In these tasks, participants are requested to put separate events (depicted in cartoon-like pictures or behavioral sentences, respectively) in their correct chronological order. To do so, some of these events require understanding of high-level social beliefs, of social routines (i.e., scripts), or nonsocial mechanical functionality. As expected, on the Picture Sequencing task, we observed longer response times for persons with ASD (in comparison with neurotypical controls) when ordering sequences requiring an understanding of social beliefs and social scripts, but not when ordering nonsocial mechanical events. This confirms our hypotheses that social sequence processing is impaired in ASD. The verbal version of this task did not reveal differences between groups. Our results are the first step toward new theoretical insights for social impairments of persons with ASD. They highlight the importance of taking into account sequence processing, and indirectly the cerebellum when investigating ASD difficulties.

Exciting the social butterfly: Anodal cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation modulates neural activation during predictive social mentalizing

“…Consequently, people with less well developed social skills, such as individuals with autism, may potentially profit substantially more from our tDCS treatment. People in this population have been found to struggle with sequencing social information that requires mentalizing ( Bylemans et al, 2023 ; Heleven et al, 2022 ; Van Overwalle & Baeken et al, 2021 ).…”

The effects of stimulating the cerebellum on social sequences: A tDCS-fMRI pilot study

“…Armonk, NY: IBM Corp). As suggested in previous studies ( Heleven et al, 2019 ; Heleven, Bylemans, Ma, Baeken, & Baetens, 2022 ), we added the AQ scores as a covariate for the analysis.…”

“…Problems with mentalizing, including the attribution of false beliefs to others, are present in several disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) ( Heleven, Bylemans, Ma, Baeken, & Baetens, 2022 ) or schizophrenia ( Hyatt et al, 2020 ). Patients with cerebellar damage have been shown to perform worse than neurotypical controls on tasks that depict sequences of social actions, particularly when those pictures depict biological human actions ( Cattaneo et al, 2012 ) or social sequences that include false beliefs ( Van Overwalle et al, 2019 a).…”