Dissociation between key processes of social cognition in autism: impaired mentalizing but intact sense of agency.

Smith et al. (2008) tested 15 high-functioning adults with autism and 15 matched adults without autism.

Each person did two tasks. One measured how well they could tell if they caused an action. The other measured how well they could guess another person's intention.

The team wanted to see if these two social skills break apart in autism.

The adults with autism were just as good at knowing when they caused an action.

But they scored much lower on guessing other people's intentions.

This shows a clear split: knowing your own actions stays strong, while reading minds stays weak.

Weinmann et al. (2023) extends this finding. They showed autistic adults can track their own view but struggle to flip to another person's conflicting view.

Fernandes et al. (2022) adds brain data. They found early attention signals to social cues are weaker, which may explain the mind-reading problems.

Akechi et al. (2018) seems to disagree. They found autistic adults rated minds and morals the same as non-autistic adults. The key difference is task style: their task was slow and structured, while Nicole's task needed fast, real-time mind reading.

McGarty et al. (2018) and McGarty et al. (2018) both back up the spared self-monitoring theme. They show autistic adults accurately judge their own memory and perception, matching the intact sense of agency found here.

You can build on your client's strong self-monitoring. Use clear feedback about their own actions before asking them to read others' minds. This study tells you the hardware for self-awareness is working, so start there and bridge outward.