"Why do they do it?": The short-story task for measuring fiction-based mentalizing in autistic and non-autistic individuals.
A short story quiz cleanly separates autistic from non-autistic adults and shows individual mentalizing gaps you can target.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Jarvers et al. (2023) built a new test called the Short-Story Task. Adults read tiny stories and answer what a character thinks or feels.
The team tested autistic and non-autistic adults. They wanted to see if the task could spot who had trouble reading minds from fiction.
What they found
Autistic adults landed in the lower third of the score sheet. The stories cleanly split the two groups.
The test also caught small differences inside each group, so it can show personal strengths and weak spots.
How this fits with other research
Murray et al. (2017) filmed the same kind of Strange Stories and got the same split. Film or text, the gap holds.
Chapple et al. (2021) asked autistic adults if fiction helps them. Most said yes. Irina’s task shows lower skill, but self-report says reading still feels useful. The clash is about method, not truth: interviews talk about feelings; the task scores right answers.
King et al. (2014) gave story-writing homework to autistic kids. The kids wrote shorter, simpler tales. Irina’s work shows the mind-reading gap lasts into adulthood, stretching the timeline.
Why it matters
You now have a quick paper tool that flags mentalizing gaps in adults. Use it during intake to see who may need social-cognition training. Pair the scores with the client’s own report about reading fiction to plan goals that feel meaningful, not just deficit-fixing.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study aimed to validate the short-story-task (SST) based on Dodell-Feder et al. as an instrument to quantify the ability of mentalizing and to differentiate between non-autistic adults and autistic adults, who may have acquired rules to interpret the actions of non-autistic individuals. Autistic (N = 32) and non-autistic (N = 32) adult participants were asked to read "The End of Something" by Ernest Hemingway and to answer implicit and explicit mentalizing questions, and comprehension questions. Furthermore, verbal and nonverbal IQ was measured and participants were asked how much fiction they read each month. Mentalizing performance was normally distributed for autistic and non-autistic participants with autistic participants scoring in the lower third of the distribution. ROC (receiver operator curve) analysis revealed the task to be an excellent discriminator between autistic and non-autistic participants. A linear regression analysis identified number of books read, years of education and group as significant predictors. Overall, the SST is a promising measure of mentalizing. On the one hand, it differentiates among non-autistic individuals and on the other hand it is sensitive towards performance differences in mentalizing among autistic adults. Implications for interventions are discussed.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2023 · doi:10.1002/aur.2871