TY - JOUR
T1 - Investigating Visual Perspective Taking and Belief Reasoning in Autistic Adults: A pre-registered online study
AU - Green, Rachel Lara
AU - Carrington, Sarah Joanne
AU - Shaw, Daniel Joel
AU - Kessler, Klaus
N1 - Copyright © The Author(S) 2024. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
PY - 2024/11/12
Y1 - 2024/11/12
N2 - As many autistic individuals report mentalizing difficulties into adulthood, the current pre-registered study investigated potential differences in belief reasoning and/or visual perspective taking between autistic and non-autistic adults. The Seeing-Believing task was administered to 121 gender-balanced participants online (57 with a self- reported diagnosis of an autism spectrum condition and 64 without), as well as Raven’s Progressive Matrices (on which the groups did not significantly differ) and the Autism Quotient. Non-autistic adults replicated previous findings with this task, revealing slower responses to belief-reasoning than to perspective-taking trials. Autistic adults did not show significantly slower or more error-prone performance during perspective taking and/or belief reasoning. In fact, the autistic group committed significantly fewer mistakes, including fewer altercentric intrusions. The main group difference in response times was a steeper increase with increasing angular disparity between self and other in the autistic group. We discuss our findings in terms of differences in self-other control, but emphasise that our findings cannot be explained in terms of simplistic deficit-based notions of autism and suggest that autistic adults might favour slightly different strategies when judging another’s perspective or belief
AB - As many autistic individuals report mentalizing difficulties into adulthood, the current pre-registered study investigated potential differences in belief reasoning and/or visual perspective taking between autistic and non-autistic adults. The Seeing-Believing task was administered to 121 gender-balanced participants online (57 with a self- reported diagnosis of an autism spectrum condition and 64 without), as well as Raven’s Progressive Matrices (on which the groups did not significantly differ) and the Autism Quotient. Non-autistic adults replicated previous findings with this task, revealing slower responses to belief-reasoning than to perspective-taking trials. Autistic adults did not show significantly slower or more error-prone performance during perspective taking and/or belief reasoning. In fact, the autistic group committed significantly fewer mistakes, including fewer altercentric intrusions. The main group difference in response times was a steeper increase with increasing angular disparity between self and other in the autistic group. We discuss our findings in terms of differences in self-other control, but emphasise that our findings cannot be explained in terms of simplistic deficit-based notions of autism and suggest that autistic adults might favour slightly different strategies when judging another’s perspective or belief
UR - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13623613241290880
U2 - 10.1177/1362361324129088
DO - 10.1177/1362361324129088
M3 - Article
SN - 1362-3613
JO - Autism
JF - Autism
ER -