Hello everyone! This is the Yinaoyun scientific research circle. I don’t eat pork. In life, we often infer other people’s psychological processes intentionally or unintentionally. This is our protagonist today - psychological theory. So about adults with high-functioning autism H

Hello, everyone!

This is One Brain Cloud Research Circle , I am and I don’t eat pork ~

In life, we often infer other people’s psychological processes intentionally or unintentionally. This is our protagonist today - psychological theory, so about Gao How do adults with functional autism make assumptions about others? We together look!

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Research status

The mind is a whole. None of its processes run in isolation. Emotions interact with memory, attention, and cognitive control.

——Ralph Adolphs

Theory of Mind (ToM, Theory of Mind) means that inferring the beliefs, desires, and intentions of others requires specialized psychological processes, and it represents that other people's thoughts are different from one's own.

Theory of mind is widely involved in our daily social behaviors and has a specific development trajectory. Studies have found that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have a significant delay in the development of theory of mind.

In healthy individuals, model-based social learning and decision analysis have successfully elucidated specific components of ToM processing. However, the use of this method to study ToM impairment in ASD has been very limited.

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New research

Based on this, the Ralph Adolphs laboratory used a new theory of mind task and a model-based approach to provide a detailed description of theoretical thinking disorders in autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

The paper is titled "Deconstructing Theory-of-Mind Impairmentin High-Functioning Adults with Autism" and was published in "Current Biology" on February 4, 2019.

designed and performed a novel social learning task in 26 high-functioning adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 53 matched healthy controls (CTL). First, a task involving donating to charity (the "Charity Task", pictured below) was learned.

In this task, subjects decide whether to donate money to one of three charities (donate) or accept it themselves (accept). On each trial, subjects were shown a picture of one of three charities with "$10" displayed on the bottom and "You" on the other side with a dollar amount displayed below (ranging from $7 to $13). .

The subject then made a choice (donate or accept). The computer program has two modes - "normal" and "reverse". In "normal" mode, the intervention occurred and reversed the subject's choice in 36% of trials (it was unchanged in 64% of trials).

In the "reversal" mode, subjects' choices were reversed in 64% of the trials (and unchanged in 36% of the trials). Therefore, in order to obtain the outcome they wanted in most cases, subjects had to change their decision (i.e., choose something they did not want) when in "reversal" mode.

After a selection, the computer screen displays a straight blue arrow indicating that the selection went as expected, and a yellow curved arrow indicating that the selection was reversed and the unselected dollar amount was removed from the screen.

Finally, the subjects answered two follow-up questions: "Is this the result you want?" ("Yes" - thumbs up, "No" - thumbs down) and "Do you think the current pattern is What?” (“Absolutely reversed”, “Maybe reversed”, “Maybe normal”, “Absolutely normal”).

To facilitate understanding of the mode structure, subjects completed a series of practice trials (21-25) in which the program mode ("normal" or "inverted") was explicitly informed by displaying a mode-specific icon. .

The subjects then performed a theory of mind task and observed another person (hereinafter referred to as the subject) performing the same charity task (shown above).

To accurately predict the behavior of an observer, subjects need to dynamically track the observer's beliefs (true or false) about the experimental environment over time and correlate this with their intentions toward the observer (donate or take). ) in order to correctly predict the behavior of the observed person.

In each trial, subjects were asked to answer three questions: Does the subject intend to donate to charity? What mode do the observers think the program is in? What choice will the person being observed make?

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Analysis of results

Analysis of behavioral results

Analyzed by overall accuracy and learning performance in the theory of mind task, it was found that compared with the ASD group, the CTL group was able to use their acquired observer beliefs to correctly interpret their behavior , so as to understand the intention of the person being observed.

Model-based analysis

In order to facilitate out-sample prediction analysis, CTL subjects were divided into two groups (CTL1 and CTL2, nCTL1=27, nCTL2=26). The data of each group (ASD/CTL) were fitted using the improved Rescorla-Wagner model (M1).

The model has two parameters - λB (learning rate of belief) and λC (learning rate of intention). The results found that there was no significant difference between the belief learning rate of the CTL and ASD groups, but the average intention learning rate of the ASD group was much lower than that of the CTL group.

Individual difference analysis

Finally, the researchers analyzed the correlation between subjects' ToM abilities (behavioral accuracy and model parameters) and social functions measured using the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS). All substantial correlations were found that directly demonstrated that impairments in subjects' theory of mind tasks were related to impairments in social behavior.

In summary, by utilizing a novel ToM learning task and model-based analysis, the researchers found that people with autism are able to track the observed beliefs about choice situations, updating them as patterns change and they rationally integrate Their estimates of beliefs and intentions are used to predict the agent's choices. These findings argue against nonspecific learning or reasoning deficits and instead suggest that ASD may have impairments in a rather specific component of ToM.

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Future Perspectives

There is vigorous debate about the mental processes that constitute theory of mind and the neural systems that underpin it. These arguments highlight the need to break down theory of mind into component processes, which in turn may be relevant to individual differences and psychopathology.

This broad goal has recently received considerable attention and achieved initial results in computational modeling of ToM. Model-based approaches have dual benefits for understanding the social impairments of disorders such as ASD.

Model selection analysis shows that the computational mechanisms of ToM learning in ASD practitioners are more heterogeneous and may even be different than those used by healthy controls. Future research should collect data from larger samples.

Future work must attempt to design ecologically valid tasks that better simulate the real world. In order to further unpack the current findings and ultimately connect them to neurobiological calculations, it will also be important to disambiguate several possible mechanisms that might explain the results so far.

Current research is limited to high-functioning adults with ASD and could be further tested with simplified tasks in children and lower-functioning individuals.

References

Rosenthal, I. A., Hutcherson, C. A., Adolphs, R., & Stanley, D. A. . (2019). Deconstructing theory-of-mind impairment in high-functioning adults with autism. Current Biology.

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