Approximating implicit and explicit mentalizing with two naturalistic video-based tasks in typical development and...

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Developmental Psychology
• Social Cognition

Background:

• Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by social communication deficits.
• Previous research suggests individuals with ASD may have greater difficulties with implicit compared to explicit mentalizing.
• Mentalizing, or theory of mind, is crucial for social interaction.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether implicit mentalizing is more impaired than explicit mentalizing in individuals with ASD.
• To compare the relationship between implicit and explicit mentalizing in individuals with ASD and typically developing (TD) participants.
• To explore the developmental specificity of mentalizing processes in ASD.

Main Methods:

• Development of two comparable naturalistic tasks to assess implicit and explicit mentalizing.
• Performance-based evaluation in 28 individuals with ASD and 23 matched TD participants.
• Correlational analysis of task performance between implicit and explicit mentalizing conditions.

Main Results:

• Both implicit and explicit mentalizing tasks were sensitive to social impairments in individuals with ASD.
• Implicit mentalizing was not found to be more dysfunctional than explicit mentalizing in ASD.
• In TD participants, performance on implicit and explicit tasks did not correlate, but in individuals with ASD, the performances were highly correlated.

Conclusions:

• Implicit and explicit mentalizing processes are separable in typical development.
• In ASD, implicit and explicit mentalizing processes are similarly impaired and interconnected.
• Findings suggest a lack of developmental differentiation between implicit and explicit mentalizing in ASD.