Mentalizing and Perspective Taking in Autistic Adults – Probing Speech Intonation, Eye Gaze and Free Indirect Discourse

Abstract

Autistic adults with average intelligence show difficulties in mentalizing and perspective taking, particularly in tasks relying on nonverbal cues or in implicit tasks. This dissertation aims to refine our understanding of these difficulties by identifying perceptual communicative abilities that may be preserved. Two experimental paradigms were employed: (i) Studies 1a–c investigated the use of nonverbal prominence cues (gaze duration towards an object and intonation of an utterance denoting the respective object) in inferring the importance of objects to a virtual character; (ii) Study 2 examined the perception of Free Indirect Discourse (FID) in short written stories, a phenomenon assumed to involve implicit perspective taking. Studies 1a–c revealed that both autistic and non-autistic participants rated objects as more important to the virtual character when associated with longer gaze duration or higher pitch accent. Three subgroups with different response strategies were identified: “Lookers” (primarily influenced by the gaze cue), “Listeners” (primarily influenced by the intonation cue), and “Neithers” (not influenced by either cue). Compared to the non-autistic group, the autistic group took gaze duration into account to a greater extent than intonation. Study 2 found that both groups rated the target sentences similarly in terms of naturalness. Specifically, (i) sentences including FID were rated as less natural than those without FID, and (ii) FID sentences anchored to the less prominent of two protagonists were rated as less natural than those anchored to the more prominent one. The findings suggest that autistic adults effectively use both nonverbal and verbal cues for perspective taking in these controlled tasks. Differences in cue preference may reflect alternative, possibly more systematic, strategies. While the tasks’ structured nature limits ecological validity, the results contribute to a more nuanced view of mentalizing in autism and call for future studies using more naturalistic designs