Social-Pragmatic Inferencing, Visual Social Attention and Physiological Reactivity to Complex Social Scenes in Autistic Young Adults

Katja Dindar,Marja-Leena Mattila,Tuula Hurtig,Antti Siipo,Leena Mäkinen,Hanna Ebeling,Antti Rantanen,Terhi M Helminen,Seppo Laukka,Soile Loukusa

doi:10.1007/s10803-021-04915-y

Abstract

This study examined social-pragmatic inferencing, visual social attention and physiological reactivity to complex social scenes. Participants were autistic young adults (n = 14) and a control group of young adults (n = 14) without intellectual disability. Results indicate between-group differences in social-pragmatic inferencing, moment-level social attention and heart rate variability (HRV) reactivity. A key finding suggests associations between increased moment-level social attention to facial emotion expressions, better social-pragmatic inferencing and greater HRV suppression in autistic young adults. Supporting previous research, better social-pragmatic inferencing was found associated with less autistic traits.

Highlights

Autistic individuals1 commonly experience social-pragmatic challenges such as difficulties in understanding and interpreting social interactions in context (e.g., Loukusa, in press; Tager-Flusberg, Paul and Lord 2005)
The current study aimed to examine differences between autistic young adults and young adult controls in social-pragmatic inferencing, visual social attention and physiological reactivity (HRV), and the associations between these measures and autistic traits
Our findings show notable variation among the autistic group, suggesting that the identified challenges are distinctly evident in a subgroup of autistic young adults

Summary

Introduction

Autistic individuals commonly experience social-pragmatic challenges such as difficulties in understanding and interpreting social interactions in context (e.g., Loukusa, in press; Tager-Flusberg, Paul and Lord 2005). People may not directly say what they mean and commonly use embodied cues (e.g., facial emotion expressions) instead to communicate their actual intentions, requiring the ability to attend to and interpret highly multimodal information in context (Levinson 2006) Such processing of contextual information to infer meaning is found challenging for autistic individuals, including children and adolescents (e.g., Angeleri et al 2016; Loukusa et al 2018; Mäkinen et al 2014) and adults (e.g., Loukusa, in press; Lönnqvist et al 2017), and associations are found between social-pragmatic challenges and autism symptoms (e.g., Volden et al 2009)

Methods

Results

Conclusion