Journal
SCIENCE
Volume 325, Issue 5942, Pages 883-885Publisher
AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1126/science.1176170
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Funding
- Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
- Medical Research Council of UK (MRC)/ESRC
- MRC [G0701484]
- Aarhus Research Foundation
- [RES-063-27-0207]
- [PTA 037-27-0107]
- ESRC [ES/G007322/1, ES/E003273/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- MRC [G0701484] Funding Source: UKRI
- Economic and Social Research Council [ES/E003273/1, ES/G007322/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- Medical Research Council [G0701484] Funding Source: researchfish
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Adults with Asperger syndrome can understand mental states such as desires and beliefs (mentalizing) when explicitly prompted to do so, despite having impairments in social communication. We directly tested the hypothesis that such individuals nevertheless fail to mentalize spontaneously. To this end, we used an eye-tracking task that has revealed the spontaneous ability to mentalize in typically developing infants. We showed that, like infants, neurotypical adults' (n = 17 participants) eye movements anticipated an actor's behavior on the basis of her false belief. This was not the case for individuals with Asperger syndrome (n = 19). Thus, these individuals do not attribute mental states spontaneously, but they may be able to do so in explicit tasks through compensatory learning.
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