Investigating visual perspective taking and belief reasoning in autistic adults: A pre-registered online study.

Abstract

Lay abstract: Many autistic individuals report difficulties in social situations, where they are required to think about what goes on in others' minds. These states of the mind can include how others perceive the world around them, their beliefs, or their desires. While research has shown that autistic children could be delayed in developing their full capacity in this regard, less is known about how adults process others' experiences and beliefs. Here we used a novel task and asked adults to participate online. Participants self-reported whether they had been diagnosed with autism or not and we split them into two groups depending on their response. We also asked participants to fill in a self-report questionnaire about social preferences and habits and we also asked them to conduct a test of their nonverbal reasoning ability. Importantly, the autistic and the non-autistic groups did not differ in their nonverbal reasoning abilities, and on our task, we observed that the autistic group committed fewer mistakes than the non-autistic group. Autistic participants were particularly fast and made fewer mistakes on those responses that overlapped with their own view and belief of reality. In conclusion, our findings do not support a simple view of autism in terms of deficits in either social or more general thinking abilities. Instead, autistic adults might favour slightly different ways of thinking about other's experiences and beliefs that is more firmly linked to their own experience and knowledge.