Pluralism, social cognition, and interaction in autism

Abstract

In this paper, I investigate social cognition and its relation to interaction in autism from the perspective of a pluralist account of social understanding by considering behavioral as well as neuroscientific findings. Traditionally, researchers have focused on mental state reasoning in autism, which is uncontroversially impaired. A pluralist account of social cognition aims to explore the varieties of social understanding that are acquired throughout ontogeny and may play a role in everyday life. The analysis shows that children with autism are well able to understand other people’s behavior by considering social rules and norms, scripts, and stereotypes. Moreover, some individuals with autism succeed in understanding other people’s behavior in terms of mental states by employing explicit behavioral rules as a compensatory strategy. The paper ends with a discussion of the social cognitive (dys)functions in autism and their relation to the motivation of individuals with autism to engage in social interaction.

Keywords:

• Autism spectrum disorder
• interaction
• pluralist theories
• social cognition

Notes

1. Methodologically, I distinguish social cognitive processes that occur automatically and, typically, unconsciously from social cognitive procedures that may be subject to conscious and deliberative control.

2. Note that, in principle, TT and ST could be extended to account for the inference of person-specific features as well (see Reeder & Trafimow, 2005 for a discussion of how motives may be attributed to other people via theory and simulation).

3. Nativist theory theorists have also pointed to the dedicated role of executive functions in successful performance on explicit false belief tasks in typically developing infants by pointing to, for example, a simultaneous execution of a false-belief representation, response-selection, and response-inhibition that is supposed to be required in these tasks, but is cognitively too demanding for preverbal infants (see Baillargeon, Scott, & He, 2010 for a discussion).

4. Notably, Hamilton and colleagues (2007) did not investigate the neural correlates of the individuals with autism themselves to support their hypothesis, but made assumptions based on an interpretation of the neuroscientific findings of others. As pointed out by Sinigaglia (2010), mirror neurons have been found to fire both when an individual observes a goal-directed action or an emotional expression of another person and when the individual performs the goal-directed action or experiences the emotion herself. But “whereas mirroring in the emotional system has been mostly accepted, mirroring for action has recently become a target of criticism” (p. 227). For example, it is controversial whether action mirroring enables an immediate understanding of the observed motor act (Sinigaglia, 2010), whether the primary function of action mirroring is an “emulative action reconstruction” that allows for interpreting the observed action in a second step (Csibra, 2007), or whether action mirroring supports the recognition of motor goals at all (see Grafton, 2009 for a discussion).

5. Alternatively, these results could be explained in terms of behavioral rules.

6. Notably, typically developing children also seem to employ theories in an inferential and conscious manner when passing explicit versions of the false belief task. Indeed, Clements and Perner (1994) have shown that children’s looking behavior indicates an implicit, nonverbal, and unconscious understanding of other people’s false beliefs already around 3 years of age, but children do not seem to have conscious access to that knowledge until ages 4–5, when they pass the explicit false belief task that requires them to indicate verbally where the agent who has a false belief about an object’s location will search for the object. Still, the neuroscientific data reviewed here suggest a difference in degree between typically developing individuals and individuals with autism.