EEG frequency tagging evidence of intact social interaction recognition in adults with autism.
Autistic adults register social interactions just as fast as neurotypicals—social struggles kick in later, not at the detection stage.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Oomen et al. (2023) showed adults short videos of two people talking or moving together.
The team used EEG caps to watch each viewer’s brain waves flicker in time with the action.
Half the viewers were autistic, half were not; all were adults with normal vision.
What they found
The autistic group’s brains locked on to the social rhythm just as fast and strong as the non-autistic group.
No extra delay, no weaker signal—interaction recognition looked the same on the EEG read-out.
How this fits with other research
Van der Donck et al. (2023) ran the same flicker-EEG set-up with faces and also saw no group gap, backing the new result.
Bunce et al. (2024) used stick-figure dyads and again found autistic adults sensed interpersonal distance shifts normally—another green light for basic social detection.
Lacroix et al. (2024) seems to disagree: they saw weaker brain tuning when autistic adults watched fearful faces. The clash fades once you notice they tested only fear faces and only spatial-frequency tuning, not whole interaction scenes.
Why it matters
If clients can spot social scenes as quickly as anyone, therapy can skip “fix the detection” drills and move to higher-level skills like response timing or emotion labeling. Use the saved minutes to practice greetings, turn-taking, or job-interview small talk where the real social friction lives.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
To explain the social difficulties in autism, many studies have been conducted on social stimuli processing. However, this research has mostly used basic social stimuli (e.g., eyes, faces, hands, single agent), not resembling the complexity of what we encounter in our daily social lives and what people with autism experience difficulties with. Third-party social interactions are complex stimuli that we come across often and are also highly relevant for social functioning. Interestingly, the existing behavioral studies point to altered social interaction processing in autism. However, it is not clear whether this is due to altered recognition or altered interpretation of social interactions. Here, we specifically investigated the recognition of social interaction in adults with and without autism. More precisely, we measured neural responses to social scenes depicting either social interaction or not with an electroencephalogram frequency tagging task and compared these responses between adults with and without autism (N = 61). The results revealed an enhanced response to social scenes with interaction, replicating previous findings in a neurotypical sample. Crucially, this effect was found in both groups, with no difference between them. This suggests that social interaction recognition is not atypical in adults with autism. Taken together with the previous behavioral evidence, our study thus suggests that individuals with autism are able to recognize social interactions, but that they might not extract the same information from those interactions or that they might use the extracted information differently.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2023 · doi:10.1002/aur.2929