Social cognition as a predictor of functional and social skills in autistic adults without intellectual disability.
Social-cognition training by itself will not move the needle on adult independence—bundle it with broader cognitive and real-life rehearsal.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Anthony et al. (2020) asked whether social-cognition scores forecast real-life skills in autistic adults without intellectual disability. They ran a single-time survey and test battery. Participants were adults who could live on their own or hold a job.
What they found
Social cognition explained only a small slice of the differences in social skills. It had an even smaller, indirect effect on daily living skills like shopping or managing money. General thinking skills and background knowledge mattered more.
How this fits with other research
Laermans et al. (2025) looked at autistic teens and found the same link, but they added brain scans. The teen study says you must treat the whole network—brain, cognition, and behavior—while the adult study says cognition alone is not enough. The two papers agree: single-target drills will fall short.
Szempruch et al. (1993) tracked high-school students for two years. Kids with better cognitive flexibility gained more social understanding. The 2020 adult data mirror that early hint, showing the predictor stays weak across the lifespan.
Lerman et al. (2017) turned the warning into action. Their brief clinic test spots job-related social gaps in under an hour. If social cognition adds little, you can still find which workplace skills need help and teach them directly.
Why it matters
Stop writing goals that only target emotion recognition or false-belief tasks. For autistic adults without ID, add sessions on planning, memory, and real-world rehearsal. Pair social-cognition drills with grocery-shopping scripts, ride-share practice, or asking for workplace help. Measure success with daily living checklists, not just social-cognition tests.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Autistic adults, including those without intellectual disability, commonly experience poor social and functional outcomes. Although reduced social cognitive ability in autism is often theorized as a mechanism of these poor outcomes, there has been surprisingly little empirical work testing this assumption. Here, 103 autistic adults without intellectual disability completed a comprehensive battery that included eight social cognitive tasks psychometrically validated for use with this population (e.g., emotion recognition and theory of mind), five tasks assessing neurocognitive abilities (e.g., processing speed and working memory), performance-based measures of their functional skills, and a standardized assessment of their social skills. Collectively, the combination of demographic variables, IQ, neurocognitive performance, and social cognitive performance accounted for 49% of the variance in functional skills and 33% of the variance in social skills. For functional skills, demographic variables, and general and neurocognition independently accounted for a significant portion of the variance, but social cognition did not. Social cognition did, however, significantly mediate the effect of neurocognition on functional skills. Social cognition also accounted for significant proportion in the variance in social skills above and beyond the relatively large contribution of neurocognition. Taken together, findings indicate that social cognitive ability contributes to functional and social skills in autistic adults without intellectual disability, but this contribution may be more limited and indirect than commonly assumed. Autism Res 2020, 13:259-270. © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Many social programs for autistic adults presume that improving social cognition will translate to better life outcomes. In this study of 103 autistic adults without intellectual disability, we found that social cognitive abilities do contribute to real-world social and daily living skills, but this contribution is small and indirect once general-cognitive abilities are taken into account. Although results substantiate social cognition as an independent cognitive capacity in autism spectrum disorder, its unique contribution to functional and social outcomes may be more limited than previously assumed.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2020 · doi:10.1002/aur.2195