The influence of presentation modality on the social comprehension of naturalistic scenes in adults with autism spectrum disorder.
Adults with autism rate social awkwardness in their own way regardless of video, text, or combined formats.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked adults with autism and typical adults to watch short social scenes.
Some scenes came as video only, some as text only, and some as both together.
After each clip, adults rated how awkward or happy the moment felt.
What they found
Adults with autism gave more unusual awkwardness scores in every format.
Yet the format itself did not make their scores better or worse.
Both groups agreed on simple happy moments; the gap showed up only with awkward ones.
How this fits with other research
Heavey et al. (2000) built the first Awkward Moments Test and saw clear mind-reading deficits in autistic adults. The new study keeps the same idea but shows the deficit looks the same no matter how you present the scene.
Cohrs et al. (2017) found that youth with autism looked less at social scenes, hinting they might miss key cues. The adult data now suggest the problem is not missing cues but judging them differently once seen.
Zadok et al. (2025) tracked live video chats and saw autistic teens synchronize less facial affect. Together, the three papers trace a line: kids avoid social scenes, teens move less in them, and adults judge them in their own way.
Why it matters
When you test social understanding, expect quirky awkwardness ratings from high-functioning adults with autism no matter the medium. Do not switch from video to text hoping for a clearer picture. Instead, teach clients the hidden rules that make moments feel awkward to most people, then practice spotting those rules in any format you use.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The comprehension of dynamically unfolding social situations is made possible by the seamless integration of multimodal information merged with rich intuitions about the thoughts and behaviors of others. We examined how high-functioning adults with autism spectrum disorder and neurotypical controls made a complex social judgment (i.e. rating the social awkwardness of scenes from a television sitcom) across three conditions that manipulated presentation modality-visual alone, transcribed text alone, or visual and auditory together. The autism spectrum disorder and control groups collectively assigned similar mean awkwardness ratings to individual scenes. However, individual participants with autism spectrum disorder tended to respond more idiosyncratically than controls, assigning ratings that were less correlated with the ratings of the other participants in the sample. We found no evidence that this group difference was isolated to any specific presentation modality. In a comparison condition, we found no group differences when participants instead rated the happiness of characters (a more basic social judgment) in full audiovisual format. Thus, although we observed differences in the manner with which high-functioning adults with autism spectrum disorder make social judgments compared to controls, these group differences may be dependent on the social dimension being judged, rather than the specific modality of presentation.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2018 · doi:10.1177/1362361316671011