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

TY - JOUR

T1 - "Making it explicit" makes a difference: Evidence for a dissociation of spontaneous and intentional level 1 perspective taking in high-functioning autism

AU - Schwarzkopf, Sarah

AU - Schilbach, Leonhard

AU - Vogeley, Kai

AU - Timmermans, Bert

N1 - 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.

PY - 2014/6

Y1 - 2014/6

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - Visuospatial level 1 perspective taking

KW - high-functioning autism

KW - Asperger syndrome

KW - attention shift

KW - implicit processing

U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.02.003

DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.02.003

M3 - Article

VL - 131

SP - 345

EP - 354

JO - Cognition

JF - Cognition

SN - 0010-0277

IS - 3

ER -