"Making it explicit" makes a difference: Evidence for a dissociation of spontaneous and intentional level 1 perspective taking in high-functioning autism

Sarah Schwarzkopf; Leonhard Schilbach; Kai Vogeley; Bert Timmermans

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2014.02.003

"Making it explicit" makes a difference: Evidence for a dissociation of spontaneous and intentional level 1 perspective taking in high-functioning autism

Sarah Schwarzkopf, Leonhard Schilbach, Kai Vogeley, Bert Timmermans

Psychology

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36 Citations (Scopus)

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Abstract

The ability of perspective taking is a fundamental aspect of social cognition. The ability to decide, what another person can or cannot see is referred to as "level 1 perspective taking". This is thought to be a process that we can make use of intentionally, but which also takes place spontaneously. Autism is characterized by impairments of social interaction, which are thought to be related to deficits in implicit rather than explicit perspective taking. In order to assess both levels of processing with regard to perspective taking, we employed an established task in patients and controls. Our results demonstrate that both groups engage in spontaneous level 1 perspective taking. In contrast to controls, however, patients reacted slower, if they had to verify the other’s as compared to their own perspective, which shows that HFA participants have selective difficulties in explicit, but not implicit, level 1 perspective taking. These findings demonstrate that while spontaneous level 1 perspective taking appears to be intact in autism, this ability is impaired in patients when used explicitly.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	345-354
Number of pages	10
Journal	Cognition
Volume	131
Issue number	3
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2014.02.003
Publication status	Published - Jun 2014

Bibliographical note

This research was supported by Volkswagen Foundation grant “Being addressed as you: Conceptual and empirical investigations of a Second-Person approach to other minds” awarded to LS and BT. LS is also supported by the Koeln Fortune Program of the Medical Faculty, University of Cologne. BT was supported by a European Commission Marie Curie Fellowship FP7-PEOPLE-IEF 237502 “Social Brain.”

We thank Dana Samson for providing the stimulus material and Julia Proft and Franka Pieplow for data collection. For helpful comments and suggestions we are also grateful to three anonymous reviewers.

Keywords

Visuospatial level 1 perspective taking
high-functioning autism
Asperger syndrome
attention shift
implicit processing

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10.1016/j.cognition.2014.02.003

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NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication Cognition. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in COGNITION, VOL 131, ISSUE 3, (2014) DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.02.003
Submitted manuscript, 1.07 MB

http://tinyurl.com/o3kkcfe

Bert Timmermans
- Psychology, Psychology - Senior Lecturer
Person: Academic

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abstract = "The ability of perspective taking is a fundamental aspect of social cognition. The ability to decide, what another person can or cannot see is referred to as {"}level 1 perspective taking{"}. This is thought to be a process that we can make use of intentionally, but which also takes place spontaneously. Autism is characterized by impairments of social interaction, which are thought to be related to deficits in implicit rather than explicit perspective taking. In order to assess both levels of processing with regard to perspective taking, we employed an established task in patients and controls. Our results demonstrate that both groups engage in spontaneous level 1 perspective taking. In contrast to controls, however, patients reacted slower, if they had to verify the other{\textquoteright}s as compared to their own perspective, which shows that HFA participants have selective difficulties in explicit, but not implicit, level 1 perspective taking. These findings demonstrate that while spontaneous level 1 perspective taking appears to be intact in autism, this ability is impaired in patients when used explicitly.",

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"Making it explicit" makes a difference: Evidence for a dissociation of spontaneous and intentional level 1 perspective taking in high-functioning autism

Abstract

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Keywords

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