The differential diagnosis between schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) remains an important clinical question, because they have overlap in clinical diagnosis. This study explored the differences between ASD (n = 44) and SSD patients (n = 59), compared to typically developing peers (n = 63), in completing an advanced Theory of Mind (ToM) task. The outcome found several differences between groups. The SSD patients showed greater difficulty in understanding social scenarios, while ASD individuals understood the stories, but did not correctly identify the protagonist’s intention. The interesting aspect of the results is that some ToM stories are more informative about the mentalistic reasoning of the two clinical groups, namely, the stories that investigate pretend, persuasion, double bluff and ironic joke constructs.
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are characterized by difficulties in social cognition (SC) domains. The aim of this study is to build an SC network to explore associations among interacting elements within this cognitive construct. We used a graph analysis to explain how individual SC domains relate to each other and how these relations may differ between ASD and typically developing (TD) groups. Seventy-six children with ASD and 81 TD children, matched for verbal mental age, were subjected to three SC measures. Our results showed that TD children exhibited an SC network characterized by a single domain (i.e., social cognition), while children with ASD demonstrated communicating node communities where social information processing measured by the Social Information Processing Interview (SIPI) represents a key point in understanding network differences between groups.
The current study evaluated three social cognition (SC) tests for their clinical utility in aiding autism diagnosis. To do so, we compared the performance of 86 children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 68 typically developing (TD) children, all aged from 4 to 10 years old, on three SC tasks [the Social Information Processing Interview (SIPI), the Comic Strip Task (CST), and the children's version of the Eyes Task] and calculated threshold scores that best differentiated the two groups. While difficulties in these abilities appear to represent the "central core" of ASD, services have largely ignored SC tests when supporting autism diagnoses. Therefore, this study attempted to validate and evaluate the diagnostic potential of these three tasks for children with ASD. To investigate the accuracy of these SC tests, we used the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. As expected, the ASD group performed worse than the TD group on the SIPI and CST, but contrary to our prediction, the groups did not significantly differ on the Eyes Task. Specifically, the overall area under the curve (AUC) for the SIPI was 0.87, with a sensitivity of 73.5% and a specificity of 83.9% at the best cutoff point (score range 0-36; best cutoff = 31). The overall AUC for the CST was 0.75, with a sensitivity of 71.1% and a specificity of 77.0% at the best cutoff point (score range 0-15; best cutoff = 11). The overall AUC for the Eyes Task was 0.51, with a sensitivity of 50.3% and a specificity of 40.2% at the best cutoff point (score range 0-54; best cutoff = 45). In conclusion, the results showed that the SIPI test has good predictive power for classifying children with ASD. It should provide substantial supplementary clinical information and help to consolidate diagnostic procedures based on standard tools. Moreover, the results of the study have substantial implications for clinical practice: the better the knowledge of SC functioning in children with ASD, the more effective the intervention program for rehabilitation.
Background
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by an impairment in social cognition (SC). SC is a cognitive construct that refers to the capacity to process information about social situations. It is a complex network that includes distinct components. Exploring how SC components work together leads to a better understanding of how their interactions promote adequate social functioning. Our main goal was to use a novel statistical method, graph theory, to analyze SC relationships in ASD and Typically Developing (TD) individuals.
Methods
We applied graph theory to SC measures to verify how the SC components interact and to establish which of them are important within the interacting SC network for TD and ASD groups.
Results
The results showed that, in the TD group, the SC nodes are connected; their network showed increased betweenness among nodes, especially for the Theory of Mind. By contrast, in the SC network in the ASD group the nodes are highly disconnected, and the efficient connection among the components is absent.
Conclusion
ASD adults do not show SC competencies and functional communication among these skills. Under this regard, specific components are crucial, suggesting they could represent critical domains for ASD SC.
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