Abstract
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be understood as a social interaction disorder. This makes the emerging “second-person approach” to social cognition a more promising framework for studying ASD than classical approaches focusing on mindreading capacities in detached, observer-based arrangements. According to the second-person approach, embodied, perceptual, and embedded or interactive capabilities are also required for understanding others, and these are hypothesized to be compromised in ASD. We therefore recorded the dynamics of real-time sensorimotor interaction in pairs of control participants and participants with High-Functioning Autism (HFA), using the minimalistic human-computer interface paradigm known as “perceptual crossing” (PC). We investigated whether HFA is associated with impaired detection of social contingency, i.e., a reduced sensitivity to the other’s responsiveness to one’s own behavior. Surprisingly, our analysis reveals that, at least under the conditions of this highly simplified, computer-mediated, embodied form of social interaction, people with HFA perform equally well as controls. This finding supports the increasing use of virtual reality interfaces for helping people with ASD to better compensate for their social disabilities. Further dynamical analyses are necessary for a better understanding of the mechanisms that are leading to the somewhat surprising results here obtained.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 22 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Behavioral Sciences |
Volume | 8 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 8 Feb 2018 |
Bibliographical note
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.Keywords
- sensorimotor contingencies
- intersubjectivity
- autism spectrum disorder
- embodied interaction
- social interaction
- virtual reality
- human-computer interface