Abstract
The recent development in the measurements of spontaneous mental state understanding, employing eye-movements instead of verbal responses, has opened new opportunities for understanding the developmental origin of “mind-reading” impairments frequently described in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Our main aim was to characterize the relationship between mental state understanding and the broader autism phenotype, early in childhood. An eye-tracker was used to capture anticipatory looking as a measure of false beliefs attribution in 3-year-old children with a family history of autism (at-risk participants, n = 47) and controls (control participants, n = 39). Unlike controls, the at-risk group, independent of their clinical outcome (ASD, broader autism phenotype or typically developing), performed at chance. Performance was not related to children’s verbal or general IQ, nor was it explained by children “missing out” on crucial information, as shown by an analysis of visual scanning during the task. We conclude that difficulties with using mental state understanding for action prediction may be an endophenotype of autism spectrum disorders.
Highlights
The recent development in the measurements of spontaneous mental state understanding, employing eye-movements instead of verbal responses, has opened new opportunities for understanding the developmental origin of “mind-reading” impairments frequently described in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs)
We start the analysis by comparing the Control and At-risk groups to chance levels and to each other and compare the three outcome groups within the At-risk participants (At-risk ASD, At-risk Atypical, and At-risk TD) to chance levels and to each other
We provide evidence that this impairment is measurable as early as 3 years of age in children at familial risk for this disorder and that it is not restricted to those children having received a diagnosis of ASD
Summary
The recent development in the measurements of spontaneous mental state understanding, employing eye-movements instead of verbal responses, has opened new opportunities for understanding the developmental origin of “mind-reading” impairments frequently described in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). The at-risk group, independent of their clinical outcome (ASD, broader autism phenotype or typically developing), performed at chance. It has been proposed that the social and communication impairments that characterize autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) stem from delays and/or difficulties with understanding that human actions are a result of mental states (e.g., desires, knowledge and beliefs), which may not always conform to reality (Baron-Cohen, 2005, but see Gernsbacher & Frymiare, 2005). Tasks that assess false belief understanding (e.g., the Sally-Anne task, the Smarties task) have repeatedly found that children with ASD fail at an age where typically developing children had long overcome any difficulties (BaronCohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985; Leslie & Thaiss, 1992) and that performance is dependent on linguistic abilities (Milligan, Astingdon, & Dack, 2007).
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