Improving visual perspective-taking performance in children with autism spectrum conditions: Effects of embodied self-rotation and object-based mental rotation strategies

Abstract

Visual perspective-taking is the ability to perceive the world from another person’s perspective, and research on visual perspective-taking ability in children with autism spectrum conditions yielded inconsistent results. To solve a visual perspective-taking task, people can mentally rotate themselves to another person’s location (embodied self-rotation strategy) or else rotate the object toward themselves (object-based mental rotation strategy). Previous interventions for autistic individuals have mainly focused on embodied self-rotation strategy, the visual perspective-taking mechanism in neurotypicals. This study examined the effects of both embodied self-rotation and object-based mental rotation strategies in improving visual perspective-taking performance in 34 autistic children and 34 ability-matched neurotypical children. All children completed three tasks: one measuring baseline visual perspective-taking performance, while the other two measuring visual perspective-taking performance after instructions in embodied self-rotation and object-based mental rotation strategies. The results indicated that autistic children had difficulty in baseline visual perspective-taking tasks. After a brief strategy learning period, autistic children benefited similarly from both embodied self-rotation and object-based mental rotation instructions, suggesting that there are various possible ways to improving autistic children’s perspective taking, and that further interventions for autistic children could consider combining different strategies that better suit their autistic traits. Lay abstract When answering how the same object might appear to others in different locations, people can provide answers by mentally putting themselves into another person’s location using the embodied self-rotation strategy or by rotating the target object toward themselves using the object-based mental rotation strategy. In this study, after learning the embodied self-rotation or object-based mental rotation strategies, autistic children improved their visual perspective-taking performance, which is believed to be impaired or delayed in autistic individuals. We recruited 34 autistic children and an equal number of ability-matched typical children and examined their visual perspective-taking performance at baseline and after learning the embodied self-rotation and object-based mental rotation strategies. As previous visual perspective-taking and other social cognition interventions for autistic individuals have primarily focused on the embodied self-rotation strategy, showing moderate effectiveness and limited generalizability, we explored the effects of both embodied self-rotation and object-based mental rotation strategies for improving perspective-taking performance and discussed their implications in this study. The results showed that autistic children had a lower performance at baseline compared with typical children; however, they were still sensitive to both embodied self-rotation and object-based mental rotation strategies. Unlike typical children, who gained more from the embodied self-rotation strategy, autistic children benefited similarly from the two strategies. This suggests that there are multiple ways to helping autistic children overcome their difficulty in perspective-taking tasks. Future interventions for autistic children could consider combining various strategies that better suit their autistic traits.

Autistic Adults Show Similar Performance and Sensitivity to Social Cues on a Visual Perspective Taking Task as Non-autistic Adults

“…Conversely, when non-autistic controls judged from their own perspective, and the agent was reaching, then they were slower and made more errors. Conson et al (2015) interpreted their findings in terms of the different strategies that can be used to solve VPT level 2 tasks (Zacks & Michelon, 2005), suggesting that these strategies varied between the autistic and non-autistic participants (for similar recent suggestions regarding younger autistic children's VPT abilities see: Pearson et al, 2016;Ni et al, 2021). One strategy, typically called an embodied egocentric transformation (EET: Pearson et al, 2016), involves imagining rotating one's own body into the position of the other agent in order to judge their perspective.…”

“…The explicit instructions to use an EET strategy when adopting the agent’s perspective could have altered strategy use away from a MR default, resulting in better than expected VPT performance in the autistic group, and hence no apparent differences between autistic and non-autistic adults (cf. Ni et al, 2021 ). Thus, we might expect—in a task that does not highlight the use of an EET strategy—that differences in explicit VPT level 2 performance might actually be observed between the groups of participants.…”