2023/11/09 by Egawa, Jun, Rizal Ichwansyah, Kawasaki, Keisuke +3
#Anticipatory look #Autism #Behavior and Behavior Mechanisms #False belief test #Medicine and Health Sciences #Mental Disorders #Object detection test #Other Psychiatry and Psychology #Psychiatry and Psychology #Theory of Mind
paper · doi:10.17605/osf.io/xdva9
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which account for more than 2% of the population, exhibit persistent deficits in social interaction and communication in adulthood. Pioneering studies have suggested that these difficulties arise from a lack of immediate, spontaneous mentalizing regarding other people's beliefs (i.e., theory of mind: ToM), specifically anticipation of other people's false-belief–driven behaviors, that is usually acquired during neurotypical development. However, this view has been challenged due to recent reports of non-replications of spontaneous mentalizing, even in neurotypical adults. Here, we combined two major implicit false belief tests, anticipatory gaze and object detection tests, into a single paradigm to overcome the disadvantages of individual tasks and to test cross-paradigm consistency. In our pilot study, a within-subject comparison confirmed reproducibility of spontaneous ToM and significant across-task consistency in neurotypical adults. In the present study, we will add more sample and next apply the combined task to the ASD patients to test whether the group difference is significant.