"Making it explicit" makes a difference: Evidence for a dissociation of spontaneous and intentional level 1 perspective taking in high-functioning autism

This research was supported by Volkswagen Foundation grant “Being addressed as you: Conceptual and empirical investigations of a Second-Person approach to other minds” awarded to LS and BT. LS is also supported by the Koeln Fortune Program of the Medical Faculty, University of Cologne. BT was supported by a European Commission Marie Curie Fellowship FP7-PEOPLE-IEF 237502 “Social Brain.” We thank Dana Samson for providing the stimulus material and Julia Proft and Franka Pieplow for data collection. For helpful comments and suggestions we are also grateful to three anonymous reviewers.Peer reviewedPreprin

Disturbed Experience of Time in Depression - Evidence from Content Analysis

Disturbances in the experience of time have been a commonly reported feature of depressive disorders since the beginning of modern psychiatry and psychological research. However, qualitative research approaches to investigate the phenomenon are rarely used. We employed content analysis to investigate disturbances of time experience in Major Depressive Disorder. Our analysis from 25 participants showed that individuals with Major Depressive Disorder subjectively seem to have lost the ability to influence or change the present, resulting in an impersonal and blocked future. The present is rendered meaningless, the past unchangeably negative, and the passage of time turned into a dragging, inexorable, and viscous continuance. The overall,—possibly intersubjective—concept of time experience, remains largely intact, causing or adding to depressive mood and suffering. We elaborate on how these findings reflect previous theories on the experience of time in depression. This study might encourage future inquiries into both the phenomenal and neuroscientific foundation of time experience under psychopathological conditions

Eyes on the mind : investigating the influence of gaze dynamics on the perception of others in real-time social interaction

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This study was partially supported by a grant of the Köln Fortune Program of the Medical Faculty at the University of Cologne to Leonhard Schilbach and by a grant “Other Minds” of the German Ministry of Research and Education to Kai Vogeley. The authors would like to thank Stephanie Alexius and Leonhard Engels for their assistance in data collection.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Why we interact : on the functional role of the striatum in the subjective experience of social interaction

Acknowledgments We thank Neil Macrae and Axel Cleeremans for comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. Furthermore, we are grateful to Dorothé Krug and Barbara Elghahwagi for their assistance in data acquisition. This study was supported by a grant of the Köln Fortune Program of the Medical Faculty at the University of Cologne to L.S. and by a grant “Other Minds” of the German Ministry of Research and Education to K.V.Peer reviewedPreprin

Are Executive Dysfunctions Relevant for the Autism-Specific Cognitive Profile?

Executive functions (EF) have been shown to be important for the understanding of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), but dysfunctions of EF are not autism-specific. The specific role of EF in ASD, its relationship to core autism characteristics, such as mentalizing, needs to be explored. Medline- and PsychINFO databases were searched for studies published between 1990 and 2020 that included measures of EF in ASD and typically developing control persons (TD) in combination with either Theory of Mind (ToM) or Weak Central Coherence (WCC) tasks. A pre-registered meta-analysis and cross-study regression was performed including a total of 42 studies (ASD n = 1,546, TD n = 1,206). Results were reported according to PRISMA guidelines. In all cognitive domains, the ASD group showed significantly reduced performance. Importantly, EF subdomains and ToM were not significantly correlated. This finding rules out a significant association between EF subdomains and ToM and questions the relevance of EF dysfunctions for the autism-specific feature of reduced mentalizing

A Non-Verbal Turing Test: Differentiating Mind from Machine in Gaze-Based Social Interaction

In social interaction, gaze behavior provides important signals that have a significant impact on our perception of others. Previous investigations, however, have relied on paradigms in which participants are passive observers of other persons’ gazes and do not adjust their gaze behavior as is the case in real-life social encounters. We used an interactive eye-tracking paradigm that allows participants to interact with an anthropomorphic virtual character whose gaze behavior is responsive to where the participant looks on the stimulus screen in real time. The character’s gaze reactions were systematically varied along a continuum from a maximal probability of gaze aversion to a maximal probability of gaze-following during brief interactions, thereby varying contingency and congruency of the reactions. We investigated how these variations influenced whether participants believed that the character was controlled by another person (i.e., a confederate) or a computer program. In a series of experiments, the human confederate was either introduced as naïve to the task, cooperative, or competitive. Results demonstrate that the ascription of humanness increases with higher congruency of gaze reactions when participants are interacting with a naïve partner. In contrast, humanness ascription is driven by the degree of contingency irrespective of congruency when the confederate was introduced as cooperative. Conversely, during interaction with a competitive confederate, judgments were neither based on congruency nor on contingency. These results offer important insights into what renders the experience of an interaction truly social: Humans appear to have a default expectation of reciprocation that can be influenced drastically by the presumed disposition of the interactor to either cooperate or compete

Distinct neural correlates of social and object reward seeking motivation

open access articleThe “Choose‐a‐Movie‐CAM” is an established task to quantify the motivation for seeking social rewards. It allows participants to directly assess both the stimulus value and the effort required to obtain it. In the present study, we aimed to identify the neural mechanisms of such cost‐benefit decision‐making. To this end, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging data were collected from 24 typical adults while they completed the CAM task. We partly replicated the results from our previous behavioural studies showing that typical adults prefer social over object stimuli and low effort over higher effort stimuli but found no interaction between the two. Results from neuroimaging data suggest that there are distinct neural correlates for social and object preferences. The precuneus and medial orbitofrontal cortex, two key areas involved in social processing are engaged when participants make a social choice. Areas of the ventral and dorsal stream pathways associated with object recognition are engaged when making an object choice. These activations can be seen during the decision phase even before the rewards have been consumed, indicating a transfer the hedonic properties of social stimuli to its cues. We also found that the left insula and bilateral clusters in the inferior occipital gyrus and the inferior parietal lobule were recruited for increasing effort investment. We discuss limitations and implications of this study which reveals the distinct neural correlates for social and object rewards, using a robust behavioural measure of social motivation

Adults with autism spectrum condition have atypical perception of ambiguous figures when bottom-up and top-down interactions are incongruous.

We examined the perception of an ambiguous squares stimulus evoking bistable perception in a sample of 31 individuals with autistic spectrum condition and 22 matched typical adults. The perception of the ambiguous figure was manipulated by adaptation to unambiguous figures and/or by placing the ambiguous figure into a context of unambiguous figures. This resulted in four conditions testing the independent and combined (congruent and incongruent) manipulations of adaptation (bottom-up) and spatial context (top-down) effects. The strength of perception, as measured by perception of the first reported orientation of the ambiguous stimulus, was affected comparably between groups. Nevertheless, the strength of perception, as measured by perceptual durations, was affected differently between groups: the perceptual effect was strongest for the autistic spectrum condition group when combined bottom-up and top-down conditions were congruent. In contrast, the strength of the perceptual effect in response to the same condition in the typical adults group was comparable to the adaptation, but stronger than both the context and the incongruent combined bottom-up and top-down conditions. Furthermore, the context condition was stronger than the incongruent combined bottom-up and top-down conditions for the typical adults group. Thus, our findings support the view of stimulus-specific top-down modulation in autistic spectrum condition

Multi-scale coordination of distinctive movement patterns during embodied interaction between adults with high-functioning autism and neurotypicals

Funding We acknowledge financial support from DGAPA-PAPIIT projects of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México: IA105017 (RF and LZ-F) and IA104717 (TF), Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACyT) projects 167441 (RF and LZ-F), the scholarship 638215 to LZ-F granted by the CONACyT, the Newton Advanced Fellowship awarded to RF by the Academy of Medical Sciences, through the UK Government’s Newton, and the Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship “SOCIAL BRAIN” awarded to BT. Acknowledgments We thank Charles Lenay and Dominique Aubert from the Université de Technologie de Compiègne for making the TACTOS hardware and software available to the University Hospital Cologne, and for providing technical support. LZ-F would like to specially thank Jesús Naveja and Lilia Fonseca for interesting discussions. SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02760/full#supplementary-materialPeer reviewedPublisher PD

Sensitivity to social contingency in adults with high-functioning autism during computer-mediated embodied interaction

Acknowledgments: We acknowledge financial support from the Dirección General de Asuntos del Personal Académico (DGAPA) grants IA105017, IA104717, IN113013, IN106215 and IV100116, from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and CONACYT grants 221341 and 167441 to Leonardo Zapata-Fonseca and Tom Froese; and the Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship “SOCIAL BRAIN” to Bert Timmermans. We thank Charles Lenay and Dominique Aubert from the Institut Technique de Compiègne for making the TACTOS hardware and software available in Cologne, and providing technical support. Leonardo Zapata-Fonseca would like to specially thank Jorge Campos, Leticia Cruz, Jesús Naveja, Juha Lahnakoski, Tore Erdmann and Lilia Fonseca for interesting discussions, as well as with help for processing of the data.Peer reviewedPublisher PD