Social motivation and implicit theory of mind in children with autism spectrum disorder.
Preschoolers with autism skip social sights and sounds, and this gap predicts later mind-reading trouble.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Burnside et al. (2017) watched preschoolers with and without autism look at short videos. Some clips showed faces. Others showed moving dots that walked like people.
The team also ran a sneaky false-belief task on a computer. Kids saw a puppet hide a toy and then leave. Another puppet moved it. The question: where will the first puppet look when he returns?
No one told the kids to watch anything. The study simply measured where their eyes went and what they expected the puppet to do.
What they found
Children with autism looked at faces and walking dots just as little as they looked at random shapes. Typical kids looked longer at both social cues.
On the hidden-toy task, typical kids glanced toward the real spot before the puppet arrived. Kids with autism did not. The two skills were linked only in the typical group.
How this fits with other research
The result lines up with Sutphin et al. (1998), the first team to show that kids with autism ignore everyday social sounds and sights. Kimberly’s group adds that this early miss may snowball into later mind-reading trouble.
Zhou et al. (2019) ran a near-copy study and saw the same eye-gaze blank spots, giving us two snapshots that say the same thing: preschoolers with autism do not spontaneously figure out what others think.
Flanagan et al. (2015) seems to disagree. They found that older, mental-age-matched kids with autism could shift attention to social cues just fine. The gap may close with age or when the cue is crystal clear, so the social orienting problem is strongest in the toddler years.
Why it matters
If a child does not notice faces or biological motion, he has fewer chances to practice reading minds. You can’t learn from social cues you never see. Start therapy by making social stimuli bigger, louder, and paired with strong reinforcers. Use eye-tracking games or animated faces to build orienting first, then layer in explicit perspective-taking drills once the child reliably looks.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
UNLABELLED: According to the social motivation theory of autism, children who develop Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have early deficits in social motivation, which is expressed by decreased attention to social information. These deficits are said to lead to impaired socio-cognitive development, such as theory of mind (ToM). There is little research focused on the relation between social motivation and ToM in this population. The goal of the present study was to investigate the link between one aspect of social motivation, social orienting, and ToM in preschoolers with ASD. It was expected that, in contrast to typically developing (TD) children, children with ASD would show impaired performance on tasks measuring social orienting and ToM. It was also expected that children's performance on the social orienting tasks would be correlated with their performance on the ToM task. A total of 17 children with ASD and 16 TD children participated in this study. Participants completed two social orienting tasks, a face preference task and a biological motion preference task, as well an implicit false belief task. Results reveal that TD children, but not children with ASD, exhibited social preference as measured by a preference for faces and biological motion. Furthermore, children with ASD tended to perform worse on the ToM task compared to their TD counterparts. Performance on the social motivation tasks and the ToM task tended to be related but only for the TD children. These findings suggest that ToM is multifaceted and that motivational deficits might have downstream effects even on implicit ToM. Autism Res 2017, 10: 1834-1844. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: The goal of the present study was to examine the link between poor attention to social information and mindreading abilities in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Results demonstrated that children with ASD tended to perform worse than neurotypical children on both social orienting and theory of mind tasks. Preference for human faces and motion tended to be related but only for the neurotypical children. These findings provide partial support for the social motivation theory.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2017 · doi:10.1080/15248372.2015.1086771