Belief-attribution in adults with and without autistic spectrum disorders.
Adults with autism need more time and help to let go of real facts and adopt someone else’s false belief.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Bradford et al. (2018) asked adults with and without autism to do a computer false-belief task.
People had to hold two ideas at once: where the object really is and where a story character thinks it is.
The computer timed how fast and how accurately each adult switched between these two belief states.
What they found
Adults with autism were slower and made more errors when they had to swap between the two beliefs.
They seemed to get stuck on the real location and could not easily use the character’s false belief.
How this fits with other research
van der Miesen et al. (2024) later used eye-tracking and saw the same sticking problem. Autistic adults looked at social cues but still did not predict action based on false belief, showing the trouble is not missing the cue but using it.
Weinmann et al. (2023) found a similar small gap in perspective-switching speed, so the slowdown appears even when the task is not about belief.
Morsanyi et al. (2012) showed teens with autism also struggle to ignore real facts when they reason about fantasy worlds. Together these studies say the difficulty is not age-limited and is bigger than belief alone: it is about letting go of one truth to hold another.
Why it matters
If your client with autism seems to “lock on” to one view, give extra wait time and state the other view aloud. Break perspective-taking drills into clear steps and cue when to drop the old fact and pick up the new one. These tiny supports can cut errors in job or social-skills tasks that need rapid mind-reading.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
An important aspect of daily life is the ability to infer information about the contents of other people's minds, such as what they can see and what they know, in order to engage in successful interactions. This is referred to as possession of a "Theory of Mind" (ToM). Past research has shown that adults with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) often show deficits in social communication abilities, although can successfully pass tests of explicit ToM. The current study utilized a computerized false-belief task to explore subtle differences (i.e., measuring response times and accuracy rates) in how efficiently ToM capacities-specifically, belief-attribution-are utilized in adults with and without ASD. In the task, participants were asked to attribute a belief-state to either themselves or another person, following establishment of a true or false-belief scenario. Results revealed comparable patterns of ToM engagement across individuals with and without ASD, with faster and more accurate responses to "Self" versus "Other" oriented questions, and slower response times when shifting between the "Self" and "Other" perspective compared to when maintaining a perspective. However, autistic individuals showed a particular deficit in correctly identifying a belief-state in false-belief trials, in which two contrasting belief-states had to be held in mind, suggesting more difficulty disengaging from current, reality based belief-states than neuro-typical individuals. Autism Res 2018, 11: 1542-1553. © 2018 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: To successfully communicate, we have to think about what other people do/do not know; this is called having a "Theory of Mind." This study looked at how well people use their Theory of Mind when thinking about the contents of people's minds. Results showed that people with autism had difficulties considering more than one mental state at a time, suggesting they may have more trouble in stopping themselves thinking about what is happening in reality than people without autism.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2018 · doi:10.1002/aur.2032