Skip to main content

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Developmental Psychology
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1458101
This article is part of the Research Topic Theory of Mind in Relation to Other Cognitive Abilities - Volume II View all 6 articles

Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder Exhibit Intact Physical Causal Inference but Weak Intention Inference

Provisionally accepted
Meng-Jung Liu Meng-Jung Liu *
  • National Kaohsiung Normal University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show impaired mentalizing skills, specifically in understanding intentions. They have difficulty understanding social situations with multiple cues due to their limited ability to perceive subtle social contextual cues. Studies that used comic strips and the strange stories as intention attribution tests found that individuals with ASD exhibit a reduced ability in attributing intentions compared to inferring causal consequences. This study aims to investigate the ability of adolescents with ASD to infer intentions in social contexts, and to explore how intention inference relates to working memory and basic attention, including sustained attention, selective attention, and divided attention. The test materials used in this study were static photographs of social scenes taken in everyday settings. The results show that the physical causal inference ability of adolescents with ASD is comparable to typically developing adolescents, whereas intention inference is notably weaker. Furthermore, working memory predicts physical causal inference and divided attention predicts intention inference in ASD.

    Keywords: Autism Spectrum Disorder, Theory of Mind, Mentalizing, Intention attribution, physical causal inference, intention inference

    Received: 01 Jul 2024; Accepted: 08 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Liu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Meng-Jung Liu, National Kaohsiung Normal University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.