On the basis of relative strengths that have been attributed to the autistic cognitive profile, it has been suggested by a number of theorists that people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) excel at spatial navigational tasks. However, many of these claims have been made in the absence of a close inspection of extant data in the scientific literature, let alone anecdotal reports of daily navigational experiences. The present review gathers together published studies that have attempted to explicitly address functional components (...) of navigation in ASD populations, including assays of wayfinding, large-scale search, and path integration. This inspection reveals a pattern of apparent strengths and weaknesses in navigational abilities, thus illustrating the necessity for a more measured and comprehensive approach to the understanding of spatial behavior in ASD. (shrink)

Previous studies using the dot-perspective task postulated that people automatically take into account others' perspective even when it prevents them from achieving their own goals. This human ability may be of key importance for the ascription of mental states and social interactions. The cognitive and emotional determinants of automatic perspective taking is still matter of debate. To address this issue, we examined the performance in the Samson et al. APT task in 91 healthy adults who underwent a detailed neuropsychological testing (...) including assessment of their general intelligence, attention and impulsivity, alexithymia, and measures of affective empathy and explicit theory of mind. Univariate and multiple linear regression models were used to explore the association between mean reaction times in the APT task, and the CPT-II parameters, WAIS global score, TAS, and GeSoCS and mini-SEA scores. Only the CPT-II parameters were significantly associated with the mean reaction times. Increased omissions, commissions, and detectability as well as hit reaction time standard error in CPT-II were all related to worse performances both in Self and Other conditions. The mean number of errors was negatively associated with the GeSoCS score. Among the variables studied, only CPT-II parameters had a significant impact on egocentric and altercentric interference. Neither global intelligence nor alexithymia have an effect on dot-perspective task performance. The present findings suggest that people with lower attentional resources and increased impulsivity display worse performances in the APT task and are less responsive to both egocentric and altercentric interference. (shrink)

Perspective taking has been proposed to be impaired in persons with autism spectrum disorder, especially when implicit processing is required. In narrative texts, language perception and interpretation is fundamentally guided by taking the perspective of a narrator. We studied perspective taking in the linguistic domain of so-called Free Indirect Discourse, during which certain text segments have to be interpreted as the thoughts or utterances of a protagonist without explicitly being marked as thought or speech representations of that protagonist. Crucially, the (...) correct interpretation of text segments as FID depends on the ability to detect which of the protagonists “stands out” against the others and is therefore identifiable as implicit thinker or speaker. This so-called “prominence” status of a protagonist is based on linguistic properties, in other words, the perspective is “hidden” and has to be inferred from the text material. In order to test whether this implicit perspective taking ability that is required for the interpretation of FID is preserved in persons with ASD, we presented short texts with three sentences to adults with and without ASD. In the last sentence, the perspective was switched either to the more or the less prominent of two protagonists. Participants were asked to rate the texts regarding their naturalness. Both diagnostic groups rated sentences with FID anchored to the less prominent protagonist as less natural than sentences with FID anchored to the more prominent protagonist. Our results that the high-level perspective taking ability in written language that is required for the interpretation of FID is well preserved in persons with ASD supports the conclusion that language skills are highly elaborated in ASD so that even the challenging attribution of utterances to protagonists is possible if they are only implicitly given. We discuss the implications in the context of claims of impaired perspective taking in ASD as well as with regard to the underlying processing of FID. (shrink)