Jellema Tjeerd, Lorteije Jeannette, van Rijn Sophie, van t' Wout Mascha, de Haan Edward, van Engeland Herman, Kemner Chantal
Hull University, Department of Psychology, Hull, East Yorkshire, United Kingdom.
Autism Res. 2009 Aug;2(4):192-204. doi: 10.1002/aur.83.
A new social distance judgment task was used to measure quantitatively the extent to which social cues are immediately and involuntary interpreted by typically developing (TD) individuals and by individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The task thus tapped into the ability to involuntary "pick up" the meaning of social cues. The cues tested were social attention and implied biological motion. Task performance of the ASD and TD groups was similarly affected by a perceptual low-level illusion induced by physical characteristics of the stimuli. In contrast, a high-level illusion induced by the implications of the social cues affected only the TD individuals; the ASD individuals remained unaffected (causing them to perform superior to TD controls). The results indicate that despite intact perceptual processing, the immediate involuntary interpretation of social cues can be compromised. We propose that this type of social cue understanding is a distinct process that should be differentiated from reflective social cue understanding and is specifically compromised in ASD. We discuss evidence for an underpinning neural substrate.
一项新的社会距离判断任务被用于定量测量典型发育（TD）个体和自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）个体对社会线索进行即时和非自愿解读的程度。该任务因此探究了非自愿“领会”社会线索含义的能力。所测试的线索是社会注意力和隐含的生物运动。刺激的物理特征所诱发的一种感知层面的低水平错觉对ASD组和TD组的任务表现产生了类似的影响。相比之下，社会线索的含义所诱发的一种高水平错觉仅影响了TD个体；ASD个体未受影响（导致他们的表现优于TD对照组）。结果表明，尽管感知加工完好，但社会线索的即时非自愿解读可能会受到损害。我们提出，这种类型的社会线索理解是一个独特的过程，应与反思性社会线索理解区分开来，并且在ASD中尤其受到损害。我们讨论了关于其潜在神经基质的证据。
