Abstract
We report an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment that tests whether autistic adults are able to maintain and switch between counterfactual and factual worlds. Participants (N = 48) read scenarios that set up a factual or counterfactual scenario, then either maintained the counterfactual world or switched back to the factual world. When the context maintained the world, participants showed appropriate detection of the inconsistent critical word. In contrast, when participants had to switch from a counterfactual to factual world, they initially experienced interference from the counterfactual context, then favoured the factual interpretation of events. None of these effects were modulated by group, despite group-level impairments in Theory of Mind and cognitive flexibility among the autistic adults. These results demonstrate that autistic adults can appropriately use complex contextual cues to maintain and/or update mental representations of counterfactual and factual events.
Highlights
Counterfactual statements depict hypothetical events that are counter to reality
In two experiments reported in Ferguson and Cane (2015), participants read an initial sentence, which set up a counterfactual scenario (e.g. “If it had rained this morning, Susan would have rushed to get to work”), followed by a second sentence that manipulated linguistic cues to either maintain the counterfactual world (“In the end, Susan would have arrived at work early”) or switch back to the factual world (“In the end, Susan arrived at work late”)
The present study examined the comprehension of counterfactuals in a sample of autistic adults and their TD peers
Summary
Counterfactual statements depict hypothetical events that are counter to reality. Such utterances are used in day-to-day communication to express emotions such as regret (‘if only I had done that...’) or relief (‘at least I didn’t do that...’), and their use is important in generating alternative actions that could have led to better outcomes. More recent empirical research with autistic adults has shown that real-time counterfactual understanding is undiminished, or even enhanced, in autistic adults compared to TD adults (Black et al, 2018, 2019; Ferguson et al, 2019) These studies used eye-tracking to measure the ease with which participants integrated events in short factual or counterfactual narratives, and varied the demands they placed on readers’ executive capacities, imagination, and emotional reasoning. This possibility is compatible with the complex information processing theory which posits that the cognitive profile in autism reflects a general deficit integrating information across distributed cortical systems and using top-down knowledge when task demands are high (CIP; Minshew et al, 1997, 2008; Minshew & Goldstein, 1998; Williams et al, 2015)
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