Typical integration of emotion cues from bodies and faces in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Brewer, Rebecca; Biotti, Federica; Bird, Geoffrey; Cook, Richard

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2017.05.011

“…Yet, individuals with ASD struggled to align the conceptualizations of their communicative signals with those of their interaction partners when the problem space afforded multiple solutions. This impairment could be isolated because the novel communicative setting prevented access to pre-existing contextual cues that cognitively-able individuals with ASD can capitalize on to resolve ambiguity (Au-Yeung, Kaakinen, Liversedge, & Benson, 2015;Birmingham, Stanley, Nair, & Adolphs, 2015;Branigan, Tosi, & Gillespie-Smith, 2016;Brewer, Biotti, Bird, & Cook, 2017;Hahn, Snedeker, & Rabagliati, 2015;Nadig, Seth, & Sasson, 2015;Pijnacker, Hagoort, Buitelaar, Teunisse, & Geurts, 2009) . Under these experimentally-generated conditions, built to recreate the fleeting ambiguities of everyday interaction, communication requires more than pruning a decision tree of possible signals or iteratively optimizing behavioral outcomes (Botvinick & Weinstein, 2014;Donoso, Collins, & Koechlin, 2014;Keysers & Perrett, 2004) .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Communicative Misalignment in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Wadge¹,

Brewer²,

Bird³

et al. 2018

Preprint

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Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is diagnosed on the basis of communicative impairments observed in everyday social interactions. Although individuals with ASD show surprising proficiency on several lab tests of social cognition, face-to-face interaction proves problematic and has been associated with biases in processing biological and multimodal linguistic cues. Here, we provide empirical evidence characterizing a special interactional challenge raised by interpersonal communication in people with ASD, which persists even during interactions stripped of those biases. During online, experimentally-controlled interactions, both adults with ASD (N=22) and neurotypical adults (N=30) generated intelligible communicative behaviors toward their partners. Both groups showed a similar propensity for modifying their behavior after misunderstandings, indicating matched social motivation and cognitive flexibility. Yet, communicative success was lower when autistic individuals interacted with other individuals, both with and without ASD, to solve communicative problems that afforded multiple solutions. Neurotypical pairs navigated through those epochs of communicative ambiguity by taking recent signals into account, and aligned their conceptualizations of novel communicative behaviors. In contrast, pairs with one or more ASD members were less likely to produce communicative behaviors informed by their pair-specific history of interaction and mutual understanding. The precise characterization of the cognitive source of these communicative misalignments provides novel boundaries to the general notion that ASD is linked to altered mentalizing abilities. Furthermore, the findings illustrate the cognitive and clinical importance of considering human communication as a solution to a conceptual alignment challenge, and how ineffective the human communicative system is without this special interactional ingredient.

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“…Yet, individuals with ASD struggled to align the conceptualizations of their communicative signals with those of their interaction partners when the problem space afforded multiple solutions. This impairment could be isolated because the novel communicative setting prevented access to pre-existing contextual cues that cognitively-able individuals with ASD can capitalize on to resolve ambiguity (Au-Yeung, Kaakinen, Liversedge, & Benson, 2015;Birmingham, Stanley, Nair, & Adolphs, 2015;Branigan, Tosi, & Gillespie-Smith, 2016;Brewer, Biotti, Bird, & Cook, 2017;Hahn, Snedeker, & Rabagliati, 2015;Nadig, Seth, & Sasson, 2015;Pijnacker, Hagoort, Buitelaar, Teunisse, & Geurts, 2009) . Under these experimentally-generated conditions, built to recreate the fleeting ambiguities of everyday interaction, communication requires more than pruning a decision tree of possible signals or iteratively optimizing behavioral outcomes (Botvinick & Weinstein, 2014;Donoso, Collins, & Koechlin, 2014;Keysers & Perrett, 2004) .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Communicative misalignment in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Wadge

¹

,

Brewer

²

,

Bird

³

et al. 2019

Cortex

Self Cite

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Communication deficits are a defining feature of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), manifest during social interactions. Previous studies investigating communicative deficits have largely focused on the perceptual biases, social motivation, cognitive flexibility, or mentalizing abilities of isolated individuals. By embedding autistic individuals in live non-verbal interactions, we characterized a novel cause for their communication deficits. Adults with ASD matched neurotypical individuals in their ability and propensity to generate and modify intelligible behaviors for a communicative partner. However, they struggled to align the meaning of those behaviors with their partner when meaning required referencing their recent communicative history. This communicative misalignment explains why autistic individuals are vulnerable in everyday interactions, which entail fleeting ambiguities, but succeed in social cognition tests involving stereotyped contextual cues. These findings illustrate the cognitive and clinical importance of considering social interaction as a communicative alignment challenge, and how ineffective human communication is without this key interactional ingredient.

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“…Recent work for instance has shown that individuals with high levels of social anxiety looked away from the face when determining emotion, but instead focused on the hands (Kret, Stekelenburg et al 2017). Similarly, Brewer, Biotti et al (2017) showed that individuals with ASD who show a reduced attention to faces could have a greater reliance on bodily cues for emotion recognition. We have also previously shown that children are adult-like in their ability to recognize emotions from the body by approximately 8 years of age (Ross, Polson et al 2012).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Removing hand form information specifically impairs emotion recognition for fearful and angry body stimuli

Ross¹,

Flack²

2019

Preprint

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Emotion perception research has largely been dominated by work on facial expressions, but emotion is also strongly conveyed from the body. Research exploring emotion recognition from the body tends to refer to ‘the body’ as a whole entity. However, the body is made up of different components (hands, arms, trunk etc.), all of which could be differentially contributing to emotion recognition. We know that the hands can help to convey actions, and in particular are important for social communication through gestures, but we currently do not know to what extent the hands influence emotion recognition from the body. Here, 93 adults viewed static emotional body stimuli with either the hands, arms, or both components removed and completed a forced-choice emotion recognition task. Removing the hands significantly reduced recognition accuracy for fear and anger, but made no significant difference to the recognition of happiness and sadness. Removing the arms had no effect on emotion recognition accuracy compared to the full-body stimuli. These results suggest the hands may play a key role in the recognition of emotions from the body.

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Typical integration of emotion cues from bodies and faces in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Cited by 22 publications

References 55 publications

Communicative Misalignment in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Communicative Misalignment in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Communicative misalignment in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Removing hand form information specifically impairs emotion recognition for fearful and angry body stimuli

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