Mindblind Eyes: An Absence of Spontaneous Theory of Mind in Asperger Syndrome

Abstract

Adults with Asperger syndrome can understand mental states such as desires and beliefs (mentalizing) when explicitly prompted to do so, despite having impairments in social communication. We directly tested the hypothesis that such individuals nevertheless fail to mentalize spontaneously. To this end, we used an eye tracking task that has revealed the spontaneous ability to mentalize in typically-developing infants. We showed that, like infants, neurotypical adults' (N = 17) eye movements anticipated an actor's behaviour on the basis of her false belief. This was not the case for individuals with Asperger syndrome (N = 19). Thus, these individuals do not attribute mental states spontaneously, but may be able to do so in explicit tasks through compensatory learning.

Approximating Implicit and Explicit Mentalizing with Two Naturalistic Video-Based Tasks in Typical Development and Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…As expected and in line with a great body of literature (Happé and Frith 1996;Hill and Frith 2003;Senju 2013), individuals with ASD scored significantly lower on the direct and indirect task than the TD comparison group, with more impaired individuals scoring lower than less impaired individuals. In contrast to our expectations, which were based on previous studies (Senju et al 2009;Callenmark et al 2013), we did not find an interaction between task and group, suggesting that individuals with ASD were not more impaired in implicit than in explicit mentalizing. Both previous studies showed that individuals with ASD had impairments in implicit, spontaneously occurring mental state inferences, although they were capable of explicit mentalizing.…”

“…More specifically, both studies used highly structured and static direct tasks and unstructured, more dynamic indirect tasks. For example, in the study by Senju et al (2009) aberrant implicit mentalizing processing was inferred from a lack of visual attention anticipating where a protagonist in a film clip would look for a hidden object. In contrast, the direct mentalizing tasks used in this study assessed whether participants were able to pass static false belief tasks.…”

“…Given that the deficits of individuals with ASD are more pronounced in unstructured dynamic settings (Volkmar et al 2004), the observed differences between implicit and explicit mentalizing could result from differences in the task formats. The simple false belief tasks used Senju et al (2009), such as the Sally-Ann task by Baron-Cohen et al (1985), have been shown to produce ceiling effects in participants with a mental age above 6 years ) and therefore may not have been sensitive enough to capture differences between groups. With respect to the more advanced Strange Stories test by Happé (1994), the authors used a small subsample (8 stories) out of the total set of 24 stories.…”

“…For instance, Kliemann et al (2013) found that ASD participants showed greater deficits in implicit than in explicit facial emotion recognition, both assessed with comparable performancebased tasks. With regards to mentalizing, high-functioning individuals with ASD who did not show impairments on direct mentalizing tasks, showed a reduced spontaneous, i.e., implicit, capacity for belief inference (Schneider et al 2013;Senju et al 2009). …”

Predictive Gaze During Observation of Irrational Actions in Adults with Autism Spectrum Conditions

“…H with autism fail to show predictive gaze (Senju et al, 2009). In a recent study where participants saw rational and irrational actions, Vivanti et al (2011) demonstrated that both typically developing adolescents and adolescents with ASC orient to the face of an actor more after seeing an irrational action.…”