Integrating intention and context: assessing social cognition in adults with Asperger syndrome

Abstract

Deficits in social cognition are an evident clinical feature of the Asperger syndrome (AS). Although many daily life problems of adults with AS are related to social cognition impairments, few studies have conducted comprehensive research in this area. The current study examined multiple domains of social cognition in adults with AS assessing the executive functions (EF) and exploring the intra and inter-individual variability. Fifteen adult's diagnosed with AS and 15 matched healthy controls completed a battery of social cognition tasks. This battery included measures of emotion recognition, theory of mind (ToM), empathy, moral judgment, social norms knowledge, and self-monitoring behavior in social settings. We controlled for the effect of EF and explored the individual variability. The results indicated that adults with AS had a fundamental deficit in several domains of social cognition. We also found high variability in the social cognition tasks. In these tasks, AS participants obtained mostly subnormal performance. EF did not seem to play a major role in the social cognition impairments. Our results suggest that adults with AS present a pattern of social cognition deficits characterized by the decreased ability to implicitly encode and integrate contextual information in order to access to the social meaning. Nevertheless, when social information is explicitly presented or the situation can be navigated with abstract rules, performance is improved. Our findings have implications for the diagnosis and treatment of individuals with AS as well as for the neurocognitive models of this syndrome.

Making Meaningful Worlds: Role-Playing Subcultures and the Autism Spectrum

“…Baron-Cohen et al (2003) have suggested that a preference for systematizing (analyzing variables in a system to discern their underlying rules) over empathizing (intuitively inferring the internal states of others) may be fundamental to the autistic cognitive style, arguing that some of the social struggles experienced by people on the autism spectrum result from a fruitless search to find the systems that reliably predict human behavior. Similarly, in a series of tests of social cognition, Baez et al (2012) found that adults with Asperger’s Syndrome showed reduced ability to use implicit contextual cues to access social meaning; their performance was normal, however, when given explicit social information, or when the situation could be navigated using abstract rules.…”

Decoding moral judgments from neural representations of intentions

“…Furthermore, even very high-functioning adults with ASD who pass traditional tests of understanding (false) beliefs neglect beliefs and intentions in their moral judgments compared with NT adults (19,20). In the current sample, this effect was observed more strongly in z-scored behavioral data (SI Behavioral Results: Raw Behavioral Responses, Group Comparison) (21).…”

“…Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), who are disproportionately impaired on tasks that require them to consider people's beliefs and intentions (16,17), are also impaired in using information about an innocent intention to forgive someone for accidentally causing harm (18)(19)(20), but see ref. 21). …”

Inter-individual cognitive variability in children with Asperger's syndrome

“…Moreover, recent studies on AS (Happe et al, 2006b; Brunsdon and Happe, 2014) suggest high inter-individual cognitive variability, which may reflect an abnormal pattern of neurofunctional specialization in autistic individuals (Pierce et al, 2001; Cherkassky et al, 2006; Gilbert et al, 2009). Indeed, the association between cognitive performance variability and atypical brain organization has been corroborated through novel neuropsychological approaches (Hill and Bird, 2006; Towgood et al, 2009; Pellicano, 2010; Baez et al, 2012; Gonzalez-Gadea et al, 2013). …”

“…Nevertheless, studies in AS adults found preserved performance in the Reading-the-Mind-in-the-Eyes test (RMET, Ponnet et al, 2004; Spek et al, 2010; Baez et al, 2012; Gonzalez-Gadea et al, 2013). …”