"Put Myself Into Your Place": Embodied Simulation and Perspective Taking in Autism Spectrum Disorders.
Clients with autism usually solve perspective-taking by mentally rotating the scene, not by imagining themselves in someone else's body, so teach the social meaning of the new view instead of drilling more spatial puzzles.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked adults with autism to take someone else's visual point of view. They used computer tasks that required either imagining yourself in the other person's spot or simply rotating the picture in your head.
The study tracked which strategy each person chose and how fast and accurate they were.
What they found
Adults with autism scored lower than typical adults on both tasks. They mostly picked the picture-rotation strategy and had trouble stopping their own point of view from sneaking in.
In plain words, they did not 'put themselves into your shoes.' They solved the task like a puzzle instead.
How this fits with other research
Armstrong et al. (2014) saw the same thing a year earlier: adults with autism were slower when they had to imagine their own body turning. Conson et al. (2015) now adds that these adults avoid the body-route altogether and pick mental rotation instead.
Hewitt et al. (2016) later showed that autistic kids also pass perspective-taking tests by using mental rotation, not body-matching. Together the three papers trace the same non-embodied shortcut from childhood to adulthood.
Peters et al. (2018) looked at dozens of training studies and found that teaching perspective-taking by itself rarely improves real social skills. That review lines up with today's finding: if clients are just rotating pictures, extra drills may not help them understand people.
Why it matters
When you run social-skills programs, expect clients with autism to solve perspective tasks with picture-rotation, not empathy. Build lessons that make the other person's view socially useful, not just spatially correct. Add brief practice stopping the wrong viewpoint before it starts, and tie every perspective exercise to a real interaction so the skill transfers to daily life.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Embodied cognition theories hold that cognitive processes are grounded in bodily states. Embodied processes in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have classically been investigated in studies on imitation. Several observations suggested that unlike typical individuals who are able of copying the model's actions from the model's position, individuals with ASD tend to reenact the model's actions from their own egocentric perspective. Here, we performed two behavioral experiments to directly test the ability of ASD individuals to adopt another person's point of view. In Experiment 1, participants had to explicitly judge the left/right location of a target object in a scene from their own or the actor's point of view (visual perspective taking task). In Experiment 2, participants had to perform left/right judgments on front-facing or back-facing human body images (own body transformation task). Both tasks can be solved by mentally simulating one's own body motion to imagine oneself transforming into the position of another person (embodied simulation strategy), or by resorting to visual/spatial processes, such as mental object rotation (nonembodied strategy). Results of both experiments showed that individual with ASD solved the tasks mainly relying on a nonembodied strategy, whereas typical controls adopted an embodied strategy. Moreover, in the visual perspective taking task ASD participants had more difficulties than controls in inhibiting other-perspective when directed to keep one's own point of view. These findings suggested that, in social cognitive tasks, individuals with ASD do not resort to embodied simulation and have difficulties in cognitive control over self- and other-perspective.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2015 · doi:10.1002/aur.1460