Far from action-blind: Representation of others' actions in individuals with Autism

Abstract

It has been suggested that theory of mind may rely on several precursors including gaze processing, joint attention, the ability to distinguish between actions of oneself and others, and the ability to represent goal-directed actions. Some of these processes have been shown to be impaired in individuals with autism, who experience difficulties in theory of mind. However, little is known about action representation in autism. Using two variants of a spatial compatibility reaction time (RT) task, we addressed the question of whether high-functioning individuals with autism have difficulties in controlling their own actions and in representing those of others. Participants with autism showed automatic response activation and had no difficulties with response inhibition. When two action alternatives were distributed among pairs of participants, participants with autism represented a co-actor's task, showing the same pattern of results as the matched control group. We discuss the possibility that in high-functioning individuals with autism, the system matching observed actions onto representations of one's own actions is intact, whereas difficulties in higher-level processing of social information persist.

Acknowledgments

We thank Uta Frith for helpful suggestions during the planning phase of this study, Francesca Happé for sending us her advanced stories, Birte Kröger for her most valuable help in collecting the data, Beate Sodian for her advice and for establishing the contact to MAut, and all the staff members at MAut for their help in organising the test sessions.

Notes

There has been a lot of controversy about whether there is as single condition of autism that varies in severity, or whether there are different types of autism (cf. Frith, 1989; Miller & Ozonoff, 1997; Happé, 1994). The most conspicuous difference between autism and AS is that in the former, there is often a delay in language development, whereas in the latter, language skills are unimpaired. Since we did not predict any differences in performance between individuals with autism and AS for our study, we included individuals with either diagnosis. By using the term "individuals with autism" we refer to both groups.

As mentioned before, there was one participant in our study who was not able to solve any ToM tasks. This participant did not show a significant joint compatibility effect in Experiment 1, but showed a rather large compatibility effect in Experiment 2.