Ruihan, Sarah and Ishita recently published a new paper exploring implicit mentalizing in autistic adults that expands on the anticipatory-looking paradigm from Southgate et al.‘s 2007 paper. Autistic adults and non-autistic adults were found to perform similarly on an explicit mentalizing task, but autistic adults did not show anticipatory-looking behaviour in the false-belief trials of the implicit mentalizing task. These findings further document that many autistic people struggle to spontaneously mentalize others’ beliefs, and this non-verbal paradigm holds promise for use with a wide range of ages and abilities in future studies.

Read the full paper here:
Wu R, Lim JT, Ahmed Z, Berger R, Acem E, Chowdhury I & White SJ (2024). Do autistic adults spontaneously reason about belief? A detailed exploration of alternative explanations. Royal Society Open Science, 11. view here.