Exploring the building blocks of social cognition: spontaneous agency perception and visual perspective taking in autism
Zwickel, J. and White, S. and Coniston, D. and Senju, Atsushi and Frith, U. (2011) Exploring the building blocks of social cognition: spontaneous agency perception and visual perspective taking in autism. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 6 (5), pp. 564-571. ISSN 1749-5016.
Abstract
Individuals with autism spectrum disorders have highly characteristic impairments in social interaction and this is true also for those with high functioning autism or Asperger syndrome (AS). These social cognitive impairments are far from global and it seems likely that some of the building blocks of social cognition are intact. In our first experiment, we investigated whether high functioning adults who also had a diagnosis of AS would be similar to control participants in terms of their eye movements when watching animated triangles in short movies that normally evoke mentalizing. They were. Our second experiment using the same movies, tested whether both groups would spontaneously adopt the visuo-spatial perspective of a triangle protagonist. They did. At the same time autistic participants differed in their verbal accounts of the story line underlying the movies, confirming their specific difficulties in on-line mentalizing. In spite of this difficulty, two basic building blocks of social cognition appear to be intact: spontaneous agency perception and spontaneous visual perspective taking.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | theory of mind, mental state, social cognition, eye movements, triangle animations |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Brain and Cognitive Development, Centre for (CBCD) |
| Depositing User: | Sarah Hall |
| Date Deposited: | 14 Jan 2016 10:15 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:21 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/13977 |
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