Autistic traits modulate mimicry of social but not nonsocial rewards.
Social rewards lose their power to drive mimicry when autistic traits are high.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Haffey et al. (2013) asked adults without autism to watch short videos.
A human hand or a robot hand pressed buttons that gave points.
The more points, the higher the reward.
People with more autistic traits copied the hand movements less when the reward was social.
They copied robot movements the same no matter their trait level.
What they found
Higher autistic traits meant less mimicry of the human hand.
Robot hand mimicry stayed flat across all trait levels.
Social rewards drove the drop; nonsocial rewards did not.
How this fits with other research
Hidaka et al. (2023) looked at body sense, not mimicry, in autistic and non-autistic adults.
They found no link between autistic traits and how people feel their own hand.
Together the studies hint that social copying, not body sense, is what changes with traits.
Greer et al. (2014) show that traits split into social and rigid parts even in kids with ADHD.
The pattern fits: social parts, not rigid parts, tie to mimicry drops.
Why it matters
If a client has high autistic traits, social rewards may not boost imitation.
Try pairing the model with strong nonsocial rewards first.
Check if the learner copies a robot or tablet hand better.
Use that channel to build early imitation before moving to human models.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) are associated with diminished responsiveness to social stimuli, and especially to social rewards such as smiles. Atypical responsiveness to social rewards, which reinforce socially appropriate behavior in children, can potentially lead to a cascade of deficits in social behavior. Individuals with ASC often show diminished spontaneous mimicry of social stimuli in a natural setting. In the general population, mimicry is modulated both by the reward value and the sociality of the stimulus (i.e., whether the stimulus is perceived to belong to a conspecific or an inanimate object). Since empathy and autistic traits are distributed continuously in the general population, this study aimed to test if and how these traits modulated automatic mimicry of rewarded social and nonsocial stimuli. High and low rewards were associated with human and robot hands using a conditioned learning paradigm. Thirty-six participants from the general population then completed a mimicry task involving performing a prespecified hand movement which was either compatible or incompatible with a hand movement presented to the participant. High autistic traits (measured using the Autism Spectrum Quotient, AQ) predicted lesser mimicry of high-reward than low-reward conditioned human hands, whereas trait empathy showed an opposite pattern of correlations. No such relations were observed for high-reward vs. low-reward conditioned robot hands. These results demonstrate how autistic traits and empathy modulate the effects of reward on mimicry of social compared to nonsocial stimuli. This evidence suggests a potential role for the reward system in underlying the atypical social behavior in individuals with ASC, who constitute the extreme end of the spectrum of autistic traits.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2013 · doi:10.1002/aur.1323