White Sarah, Hill Elisabeth, Winston Joel, Frith Uta
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, UK.
Brain Cogn. 2006 Jun;61(1):69-77. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2005.12.007. Epub 2006 Feb 3.
We asked adults with Asperger Syndrome to judge pictorial stimuli in terms of certain social stereotypes to evaluate to what extent they have access to this type of social knowledge. Sixteen adults with Asperger Syndrome and 24 controls, matched for age and intelligence, were presented with sets of faces, bodies and objects, which had to be rated on a 7-point scale in terms of trustworthiness, attractiveness, social status, and age, or, in the case of objects, price. Despite impaired performance on two important aspects of social cognition (second-order mentalizing and face recognition) the social judgements of the individuals with Asperger Syndrome were just as competent and consistent as those of their matched controls, with only one exception: there was a trend for them to be less able to judge the attractiveness of faces if they were the same sex. We explain this difference in terms of a weakness in mentalizing, specifically the ability to take a different point of view: While all other stereotypic attributions could be made from an egocentric point of view, judging the attractiveness of faces of one's own sex requires taking the perspective of someone of the opposite sex, a challenge for people with mentalizing problems. We conclude that individuals with Asperger Syndrome show preserved aspects of social knowledge, as revealed in the attribution of stereotypes to pictures of people. These findings suggest that there are dissociable subcomponents to social cognition and that not all of these are compromised in Asperger Syndrome.
我们让患有阿斯伯格综合征的成年人根据某些社会刻板印象来评判图像刺激，以评估他们在多大程度上能够获取这类社会知识。我们向16名患有阿斯伯格综合征的成年人以及24名年龄和智力相匹配的对照组人员展示了多组面孔、身体和物体的图片，要求他们根据可信度、吸引力、社会地位、年龄（对于物体则是价格）在7分制量表上进行评分。尽管阿斯伯格综合征患者在社会认知的两个重要方面（二阶心理理论和面部识别）表现受损，但他们的社会判断与匹配的对照组一样准确且一致，只有一个例外：如果面孔是同性，他们判断面孔吸引力的能力往往较弱。我们从心理理论的弱点，特别是从不同角度看问题的能力来解释这种差异：虽然所有其他刻板印象归因可以从自我中心的角度做出，但判断同性面孔的吸引力需要从异性的角度来看，这对有心理理论问题的人来说是一项挑战。我们得出结论，阿斯伯格综合征患者在将刻板印象归因于人物图片时，表现出了保留的社会知识方面。这些发现表明，社会认知存在可分离的子成分，而且并非所有这些子成分在阿斯伯格综合征中都会受到损害。
