Wilson Alexander C, Bishop Dorothy V M
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
PeerJ. 2020 Dec 14;8:e10398. doi: 10.7717/peerj.10398. eCollection 2020.
Social communication difficulties are a diagnostic feature in autism. These difficulties are sometimes attributed, at least in part, to impaired ability in making inferences about what other people mean. In this registered report, we test a competing hypothesis that the communication profile of adults on the autism spectrum can be more strongly characterised by reduced confidence in making inferences in the face of uncertain information. We will test this hypothesis by comparing the performance of 100 autistic and 100 non-autistic adults on a test of implied meaning, using a test of grammaticality judgements as a control task. We hypothesise that autistic adults will report substantially lower confidence, allowing for differences in accuracy, than non-autistic adults on the test of implied meaning compared to the grammaticality test. In addition, we hypothesise that reduced confidence in drawing inferences will relate to the cognitive trait Intolerance of Uncertainty and self-reported social communication challenges. Finally, we will conduct exploratory analysis to assess the specificity of the communication profile of the autistic adults by comparing their performance to that of dyslexic adults, who might also be expected to experience challenges with language and communication.
社交沟通困难是自闭症的一个诊断特征。这些困难有时至少部分归因于推断他人意图的能力受损。在这份预注册报告中，我们检验一个竞争性假设，即自闭症谱系中的成年人在面对不确定信息时进行推理的信心降低，这更能强烈地刻画他们的沟通特征。我们将通过比较100名自闭症成年人和100名非自闭症成年人在一项隐含意义测试中的表现来检验这一假设，并使用语法判断测试作为对照任务。我们假设，与语法测试相比，在隐含意义测试中，自闭症成年人报告的信心将比非自闭症成年人低得多，同时考虑到准确性的差异。此外，我们假设在进行推理时信心降低与认知特质不确定性不耐受以及自我报告的社交沟通挑战有关。最后，我们将进行探索性分析，通过将自闭症成年人的表现与阅读障碍成年人的表现进行比较，来评估自闭症成年人沟通特征的特异性，阅读障碍成年人也可能在语言和沟通方面面临挑战。
