Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China.
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Child Cognition Lab, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2019 Nov;49(11):4523-4534. doi: 10.1007/s10803-019-04167-x.
The study used an eye-tracking task to investigate whether preschool children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are able to make inferences about others' behavior in terms of their mental states in a social setting. Fifty typically developing (TD) 4- and 5-year-olds and 22 5-year-olds with ASD participated in the study, where their eye-movements were recorded as automatic responses to given situations. The results show that unlike their TD peers, children with ASD failed to exhibit eye gaze patterns that reflect their ability to infer about others' behavior by spontaneously encoding socially relevant information and attributing mental states to others. Implications of the findings were discussed in relation to the proposal that implicit/spontaneous Theory of Mind is persistently impaired in ASD.
本研究采用眼动任务来探究自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）儿童在社会环境中是否能够根据他人的心理状态来推断其行为。研究共有 50 名典型发展（TD）的 4 至 5 岁儿童和 22 名 5 岁 ASD 儿童参与，他们的眼动被记录下来作为对特定情境的自动反应。结果表明，与 TD 儿童不同，ASD 儿童没有表现出注视模式，这反映了他们通过自发地编码社会相关信息并将心理状态归因于他人来推断他人行为的能力。研究结果与内隐/自发心理理论在 ASD 中持续受损的假设有关，讨论了其对这些发现的影响。
