Investigation of mentalizing and visuospatial perspective taking for self and other in Asperger syndrome.
Adults with Asperger syndrome show intact visuospatial perspective-taking but slower, less accurate mentalizing from nonverbal cues.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Williams et al. (2010) asked adults with Asperger syndrome to do two jobs. One job was mentalizing: guess what a person felt from photos of eyes. The other job was visuospatial perspective-taking: say what side of a screen an object appeared from the camera's view.
The team timed each task and counted right answers. They compared the Asperger group to typical adults of the same age.
What they found
On mentalizing, the Asperger group was slower and missed more items. They struggled to read feelings from eye photos.
On visuospatial perspective-taking, the groups looked the same. Adults with Asperger could still work out where the object sat on the screen.
How this fits with other research
Hewitt et al. (2016) seem to disagree. Autistic kids passed the same spatial task, but they used mental rotation instead of body-matching. The clash fades when you see age and strategy matter: kids use a work-around, adults may do the same.
Conson et al. (2015) deepen the story. Their adults with ASD also passed VPT tests, yet they skipped the usual 'put myself in your shoes' step. They rotated the scene in their head like an object. Intact scores can hide different roads to the answer.
Armstrong et al. (2014) add one more bump. They showed autistic adults are extra slow when they must imagine their own body turning. Together, the papers say: basic VPT can look normal, but speed drops once self-view is involved.
Why it matters
You now know a client may ace tabletop perspective tests yet still trip over real-life mentalizing. Do not drop social-skills goals just because VPT scores are fine. Add brief body-perspective drills if you want faster shifts of viewpoint. And keep teaching emotion-from-eyes lessons; that gap stays.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Mentalizing refers to making inferences about other people's mental states, whereas visuospatial perspective taking refers to inferring other people's viewpoints. Both abilities seem vital for social functioning; yet, their exact relationship is unclear. We directly compared mentalizing and visuospatial perspective taking in nineteen adults with Asperger syndrome (AS) and fifteen control participants with the same stimulus material. Stimuli depicted virtual characters surrounded by two different objects. Virtual characters expressed a preference for one of the objects indicated by facial expression, gestures or head/body orientation. Compared to controls, participants with AS showed significantly increased reaction times and decreased accuracy for mentalizing (i.e., when inferring the virtual character's preference from the character's nonverbal bodily cues). By contrast, there were no significant group differences in perspective taking (i.e., by mental own-body transformations). These findings demonstrate, first, specific deficits in AS when mental states have to be inferred from nonverbal social cues. Second, visuospatial perspective taking may not necessarily be related to social impairments occurring in autism spectrum disorders.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2010 · doi:10.1007/s10803-009-0867-4