“Put Myself Into Your Place”: Embodied Simulation and Perspective Taking in Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

Embodied cognition theories hold that cognitive processes are grounded in bodily states. Embodied processes in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have classically been investigated in studies on imitation. Several observations suggested that unlike typical individuals who are able of copying the model's actions from the model's position, individuals with ASD tend to reenact the model's actions from their own egocentric perspective. Here, we performed two behavioral experiments to directly test the ability of ASD individuals to adopt another person's point of view. In Experiment 1, participants had to explicitly judge the left/right location of a target object in a scene from their own or the actor's point of view (visual perspective taking task). In Experiment 2, participants had to perform left/right judgments on front-facing or back-facing human body images (own body transformation task). Both tasks can be solved by mentally simulating one's own body motion to imagine oneself transforming into the position of another person (embodied simulation strategy), or by resorting to visual/spatial processes, such as mental object rotation (nonembodied strategy). Results of both experiments showed that individual with ASD solved the tasks mainly relying on a nonembodied strategy, whereas typical controls adopted an embodied strategy. Moreover, in the visual perspective taking task ASD participants had more difficulties than controls in inhibiting other-perspective when directed to keep one's own point of view. These findings suggested that, in social cognitive tasks, individuals with ASD do not resort to embodied simulation and have difficulties in cognitive control over self- and other-perspective.

Observed bodies generate object-based spatial codes

“…It also implies that presenting figures in the OBT task tilted by 90° (e.g., May & Wendt, 2012) does not offer a way to control for spatial compatibility. This implies that spatial compatibility may contribute to the results of experiments that have attempted to rule out compatibility effects in this way (e.g., Conson et al, 2015).…”

What can autism teach us about the role of sensorimotor systems in higher cognition? New clues from studies on language, action semantics, and abstract emotional concept processing

“…A preliminary study with a very small sample links improving physical 'motor' perspective taking (facilitating an actor performing a physical action) with increased language of mental states and mental perspective-taking (Studenka, Gillam, Hartzheim, & Gillam, 2017). The ability to mentally 'put yourself in another's place', to simulate their visual perspective, is known to be challenging for individuals with ASC (Conson et al, 2015;Pearson, Ropar, & Hamilton, 2013) and is suggested, like mentalizing, to rely on alternative processing strategies. Investigation of the neural mechanisms of these strategies is of high research importance.…”

Toward a Molecular Profile of Self-Representation

“…Autism spectrum disorder patients have been shown to be less susceptible to feel ownership of a rubber hand (Palmer et al, 2015). Also, other experimental paradigms reported an altered sense of embodiment over the own body in the case of autistic patients (Conson et al, 2015), as their findings suggest that these patients rely less on one's own information to infer states over another person or external object. On the other hand, schizophrenic patients perceive other-generated actions as their own in a bimanual interference task, thus presenting an increased sense of agency (Garbarini et al, 2016).…”