Will portals for talk/poster abstract submission close the morning or end of the 14th?

This work is of course the result of the joint efforts of a large group of fantastic researchers (many of whom are not on bluesky): Yuko Okamoto, Toru Takahashi, Yuto Kurihara, ‪@connortkeating.bsky.social‬, Jen Cook, Hirotaka Kosaka, Masakazu Ide, Hiroaki Naruse, Carmen Kraaijkamp, and Rieko Osu 🎉🙏

We discuss why our results suggest a lack of cultural sensitivity in commonly used mentalising tasks rather than superior mentalising abilities in Japanese autistic individuals.

Intriguingly, we did not observe the same pattern in Japanese participants, where there were no mentalising differences between autistic and non-autistic observers.

We identify movement similarity as one of the dimensions along which mismatches between neurotypes may occur, and show how increased within-group variability in movement indices may be responsible for the lack of own-group mentalising advantage in the autistic group.

In showing that – at least for non-autistic participants – cross-neurotype mentalising results in lower accuracy, our findings in the UK sample replicate a prior study (Edey et al., 2016) and add partial support for mismatch accounts such as the ‘double empathy theory’.

In the UK sample, both autistic and non-autistic participants struggled more when interpreting the animations generated by the respective other group. While non-autistic participants were better at interpreting animations created by their own group, this was not the case for autistic participants.

We asked British and Japanese autistic and non-autistic adults to depict mentalistic interactions by moving two triangles around a touch-screen device, before they had to view interpret animations created by the other participants.