What Difference Does It Make? Implicit, Explicit and Complex Social Cognition in Autism Spectrum Disorders.

We tested social cognition abilities of adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and neurotypically developed peers (NTD). A multi-faceted test-battery including facial emotion categorization (FEC), classical false belief tasks (FBT), and complex social cognition (SC), yielded significantly lower accuracy rates for FEC and complex SC tasks in ASD, but no significant differences in performance concerning FBT. A significant correlation between age and performance in a FEC task and in a complex task was found only in ASD. We propose that dynamic and/or fragmented FEC tasks can elicit deficits in implicit processing of facial emotion more efficiently. The difficulties of ASD in solving complex SC tasks can be ascribed to deficits in the acquisition and application of social schemata.