Zimmer Lucie, Richardson Hilary, Pletti Carolina, Paulus Markus, Schuwerk Tobias
Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, München, Germany.
School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
Cortex. 2025 Jun;187:159-171. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2025.04.006. Epub 2025 Apr 30.
Social cognitive processes, particularly Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning, appear to differ between autistic and non-autistic individuals. This has been proposed to reflect the autistic core symptomatology of communication and social interaction difficulties. According to the predictive coding theory, autistic individuals' ToM reasoning difficulties arise from an attenuated use of prior information about others' mental states to explain and predict their behavior. This reduced use of prior assumptions makes the social world less predictable for autistic people, causing interactive mismatch and stress. Despite strong theoretical claims, robust and replicable neural differences in ToM brain regions remain elusive. Here, we investigated whether brain regions supporting ToM reasoning anticipate a narrative during repeated exposure (i.e., the narrative anticipation effect) in non-autistic adults (Experiment 1) and tested whether this effect was attenuated in autistic adults (Experiment 2). We presented a short movie with a plot including mental states with associated actions, twice, to 61 non-autistic adults who underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging [Experiment 1: M(SD) = 25.9(4.4) years]. In Experiment 2, we used the same protocol with 30 autistic [M(SD) = 32.4(10.7) years] and 30 non-autistic adults [M(SD) = 33.2(10.1) years]. Analyses revealed no narrative anticipation effect in the ToM network in either group. Exploratory reverse correlation analyses identified a ToM scene that evoked a smaller difference in response between movie viewings (i.e., less repetition suppression) in autistic adults, compared to non-autistic adults. In sum, our study shows that predictive processing in the ToM network during a naturalistic movie-viewing experiment was absent in adults. Subtle differences in a key scene provide preliminary neural evidence for the predictive coding theory and open a promising avenue for future research to better understand the nature of differences in social interaction in autistic adults.
社会认知过程，尤其是心理理论（ToM）推理，在自闭症个体和非自闭症个体之间似乎存在差异。有人提出，这反映了自闭症在沟通和社交互动方面的核心症状。根据预测编码理论，自闭症个体的ToM推理困难源于较少利用关于他人心理状态的先验信息来解释和预测他们的行为。这种对先验假设的较少使用使得社会世界对自闭症患者来说更难预测，从而导致互动不匹配和压力。尽管有强有力的理论主张，但在支持ToM的脑区中，稳健且可重复的神经差异仍然难以捉摸。在这里，我们研究了支持ToM推理的脑区在非自闭症成年人重复观看（即叙事预期效应）过程中是否会预期一个叙事（实验1），并测试了这种效应在自闭症成年人中是否减弱（实验2）。我们向61名接受功能磁共振成像的非自闭症成年人播放了一部包含心理状态及相关动作情节的短片两次[实验1：平均年龄（标准差）=25.9（4.4）岁]。在实验2中，我们对30名自闭症成年人[平均年龄（标准差）=32.4（10.7）岁]和30名非自闭症成年人[平均年龄（标准差）=33.2（10.1）岁]使用了相同的方案。分析表明，两组的ToM网络中均未出现叙事预期效应。探索性反向相关分析发现，与非自闭症成年人相比，自闭症成年人中一个引发两次观影反应差异较小（即重复抑制较少）的ToM场景。总之，我们的研究表明，在自然主义电影观看实验中，成年人的ToM网络中不存在预测性处理。一个关键场景中的细微差异为预测编码理论提供了初步的神经证据，并为未来研究更好地理解自闭症成年人社交互动差异的本质开辟了一条有前景的途径。
