Abstract
Individuals differ in their ability to feel their own and others’ internal states, with those that have more autistic and less empathic traits clustering at the clinical end of the spectrum. However, when we consider semantic competence, this group could compensate with a higher capacity to imagine the meaning of words referring to emotions. This is indeed what we found when we asked people with different levels of autistic and empathic traits to rate the degree of imageability of various kinds of words. But this was not the whole story. Individuals with marked autistic traits demonstrated outstanding ability to imagine theoretical concepts, i.e., concepts that are commonly grasped linguistically through their definitions. This distinctive characteristic was so pronounced that, using tree-based predictive models, it was possible to accurately predict participants’ inclination to manifest autistic traits, as well as their adherence to autistic profiles – including whether they fell above or below the diagnostic threshold – from their imageability ratings. We speculate that this quasi-perceptual ability to imagine theoretical concepts represents a specific cognitive pattern that, while hindering social interaction, may favor problem solving in abstract, non-socially related tasks. This would allow people with marked autistic traits to make use of perceptual, possibly visuo-spatial, information for “higher” cognitive processing.
Highlights
The imageability scale is a classical psycholinguistic measure for assessing the degree to which words evoke mental images (Paivio et al, 1968; Connell and Lynott, 2012)
That we form mental images of all kinds of sensory experiences, including motor, kinaesthetic proprioceptive, interoceptive, and emotional experiences. In line with these results, in previous research we showed that the imageability scale developed by Paivio captures the degree of imageability of words that denote things that can be perceived by the external senses, and that of words that denote internal states, those referring to emotive, proprioceptive, and interoceptive states (Dellantonio et al, 2014a,b; Pastore et al, 2015)
The aim of this study is to test whether autistic traits correlate with the capacity to imagine different kinds of words and whether the imageability scale, and the ratings obtained by it (Paivio et al, 1968; Coltheart, 1981; Wilson, 1988; Connell and Lynott, 2012), can be used as a means to predict how many autistic or, at the other end of the continuum, empathic traits a person possesses
Summary
The imageability scale is a classical psycholinguistic measure for assessing the degree to which words evoke mental images (Paivio et al, 1968; Connell and Lynott, 2012). That we form mental images of all kinds of sensory experiences, including motor, kinaesthetic proprioceptive, interoceptive, and emotional experiences (see e.g., Switras, 1978; Gollnisch and Averill, 1993; Acerra and Moseley, 2005; Anema and Dijkerman, 2013) In line with these results, in previous research we showed that the imageability scale developed by Paivio captures the degree of imageability of words that denote things that can be perceived by the external senses, and that of words that denote internal states, those referring to emotive, proprioceptive, and interoceptive states (Dellantonio et al, 2014a,b; Pastore et al, 2015)
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