Search

Description: Social communication deficits form one of the core symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and comprise difficulties in Theory of Mind (ToM, the capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states, such as beliefs, desires, or intentions, to them). One task that has extensively been used to measure inter-individual differences in mental state attribution is the so-called animations task, where participants are asked to interpret social situations depicted through the movements of two triangles (e.g., Abell et al., 2000). While traditionally, autistic individuals have been found to provide fewer and/or less appropriate mental state descriptions than controls in this task, more recent research has acknowledged the bi-directionality of these mental state attribution difficulties. In other words, non-autistic people have exhibited difficulties in interpreting depictions of social situations created by autistic people. This recent finding has the potential to fundamentally change the way we look at social interaction difficulties between autistic and non-autistic people: as a two-way process rather than a communication deficit present only in autistic individuals. In the recent years, the idea that social communication difficulties between autistic and non-autistic partners may be bi-directional has gained increasing attention, culminating in theories which frame social isolation among autistic individuals as a consequence of consistent misperceptions by the neurotypical majority (Milton , 2012; Mitchell et al., 2021). Importantly, however, what is deemed as atypical social behaviour is largely culturally dependent (e.g., Triandis , 1988; Murphy , 1976), yet the current understanding of ASD symptomatology and diagnostic standards across the globe is based on research which is highly biased towards western (i.e., WEIRD, Henrich et al., 2010) samples. Western research (i.e., research biased towards an individualist perspective) suggests that kinematic and spatial features of body movement provide informative cues which individuals use to express their own and understand others’ internal states, and that differences in bodily movement may be one of the key contributing factors to suboptimal social interaction between autistic and non-autistic people (Edey et al., 2016; Schuster et al., 2021). At present, little is known to what extent these findings transfer to other (e.g., collectivist) cultures. Indeed, different cultural norms and conventions around bodily expressions are likely to affect what cues individuals use to understand others (Bettinsoli et al., 2021). For instance, while it has been shown that British participants use movement kinematics as one of the primary cues to infer mental states from animations (Schuster et al., 2021), a lower tendency among Japanese individuals to express their internal states in body movements (Aune & Aune, 1996) may indicate that Japanese people rely on cues other than movement kinematics to decode an animation’s identity. By investigating and comparing the communication and understanding of mental states in British and Japanese autistic and non-autistic adults, this study aims to address two primary questions: (a) Do Japanese non-autistic individuals show difficulties when interpreting animations created by Japanese autistic individuals, as has been shown for UK-based participants? (b) Can movement differences between autistic and non-autistic people explain difficulties in interpreting animations in the two cultures to a similar extent? To answer these questions, British and Japanese autistic and non-autistic participants will first be asked to depict various mental states by moving two triangles across a touch-screen device while their finger and hand movements are recorded. Subsequently, all participants will view and interpret animations from all four generator groups. Findings will carry important implications for developing more culturally tailored diagnostic and treatment approaches.

Autism spectrum disorder is a developmental disorder characterised by persistent atypicalities in communication and social interaction, and restricted and repetitive interests (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). While not a diagnostic criterion for autism, differences in mentalising, that is the ability to correctly identify the mental states (e.g. seducing, mocking) of others, are wide-spread and have been argued to lie at the heart of many of the social challenges that autistic people face (e.g., Frith, 2001). Difficulties inferring mental states have been shown in experiments using the Frith-Happé animation task, where participants are asked to make judgements about actions and mental states shown in animated interactions between triangles (Abell et al., 2000; Heider & Simmel, 1944). Abell et al. (2000), for example, found that high-functioning children with autism used mentalising descriptions less frequently than neurotypical eight-year olds when describing animations and that these were often less accurate. A similar pattern has been found using the task with adults, where fewer and less appropriate descriptions of mental state animations are contrasted with descriptions of action words comparable in accuracy to a control group (Castelli et al., 2002). While social difficulties comprise a primary focus of autism research, atypical movement has also been shown to be an important component of autism (Cook, 2016). There is a marked difference between autistic and neurotypical people in terms of movement kinematics, with increased jerkiness being a characteristic feature of autistic kinematics (Cook et al., 2013; Fukui et al., 2018). The presence of atypical movement in autism is important because of the role that movement kinematics play in social cognition. For example, (Edey et al., 2017) found that neurotypical fast walkers rate slower emotions (e.g. sadness) more intensely than faster movements (e.g. anger), due to the fact that slower movements are further away from their own kinematic profile. This has important implications for understanding communication difficulties in autism because it raises the possibility that communicative difficulties between autistic and neurotypical people may not be wholly explained by limited mentalising abilities on the part of the autistic individual. Instead, it may be that the different kinematic profiles of autistic and neurotypical individuals cause difficulties inferring mental states in both directions (Cook, 2016; Edey et al., 2016). In a previous study, we used an adapted version of the Frith-Happé animation task (Abell et al., 2000; Heider & Simmel, 1944) to investigate neurotypical participants’ accuracy in attributing mental states to autistic movements and vice versa. In a modified version of the task, neurotypical and autistic participants were asked to manually direct triangles to generate their own animations depicting mental state and action words. Participants were then asked to judge animations that had been generated by other autistic and non-autistic participants. As predicted, it was found that neurotypical participants were more accurate in attributing mental states to animations created by other neurotypical participants compared to those generated by autistic participants. However, autistic participants did not show a same group advantage, scoring comparatively for both groups (Edey et al., 2016). This finding provides mixed results. On the one hand, it demonstrates that neurotypical individuals are not adept at inferring mental states of people with autism, a finding that is likely due to the atypically jerky kinematics in the autistic animations. On the other hand, if autistic people are no better at inferring mental states in animations made by autistic individuals than by neurotypical individuals, it is not possible to say that atypicalities in mentalising in autism are due to their atypical kinematic profile since, if this were the case, autistic participants should be able to correctly attribute mental states to animations which move ‘like them’. One could argue that our previous results provide strong evidence of mentalising difficulties in adults with autism. That is, autistic participants were less accurate in attributing mental states even when animations moved in a way that was similar to their own movement kinematics. However, an alternative explanation is that there were greater between-individual differences in kinematics in our autism, compared to neurotypical, group; meaning that autistic participants were less likely than neurotypical participants to see animations that truly matched their own kinematic profile. The present study will probe this alternative explanation by employing a completely digital version of the animations task. Our digital version efficiently indexes the jerkiness of animations generated by a participant and intelligently selects stimuli, from a pre-existing database, such that participants are presented with a tailored selection comprising animations that are highly similar, and highly dissimilar, to their own movements. Our digital version therefore enables us to test whether autistic participants are less accurate in attributing mental states even when animations move in a way that is similar to their own movement kinematics.

Some theories of human cultural evolution posit that humans have social-specific learning mechanisms that are adaptive specialisations moulded by natural selection to cope with the pressures of group living. However, the existence of neurochemical pathways that are specialised for learning from social information and individual experience is widely debated. Cognitive neuroscientific studies present mixed evidence for social-specific learning mechanisms: some studies find dissociable neural correlates for social and individual learning, whereas others find the same brain areas and, dopamine-mediated, computations involved in both. Here, we demonstrate that, like individual learning, social learning is modulated by the dopamine D2 receptor antagonist haloperidol when social information is the primary learning source, but not when it comprises a secondary, additional element. Two groups (total N = 43) completed a decision-making task which required primary learning, from own experience, and secondary learning from an additional source. For one group, the primary source was social, and secondary was individual; for the other group this was reversed. Haloperidol affected primary learning irrespective of social/individual nature, with no effect on learning from the secondary source. Thus, we illustrate that dopaminergic mechanisms underpinning learning can be dissociated along a primary-secondary but not a social-individual axis. These results resolve conflict in the literature and support an expanding field showing that, rather than being specialised for particular inputs, neurochemical pathways in the human brain can process both social and non-social cues and arbitrate between the two depending upon which cue is primarily relevant for the task at hand.