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Approximating Implicit and Explicit Mentalizing with Two Naturalistic Video-Based Tasks in Typical Development and Autism Spectrum Disorder

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Abstract

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been proposed to show greater impairments in implicit than explicit mentalizing. To test this proposition, we developed two comparable naturalistic tasks for a performance-based approximation of implicit and explicit mentalizing in 28 individuals with ASD and 23 matched typically developed (TD) participants. Although both tasks were sensitive to the social impairments of individuals with ASD, implicit mentalizing was not more dysfunctional than explicit mentalizing. In TD participants, performance on the tasks did not correlate with each other, whereas in individuals with ASD they were highly correlated. These findings suggest that implicit and explicit mentalizing processes are separable in typical development. In contrast, in individuals with ASD implicit and explicit mentalizing processes are similarly impaired and closely linked suggesting a lack of developmental specification of these processes in ASD.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Joerg Schulze, member of the Computer and Media Service team (CMS) at the Humboldt University, for his advice and support with the production and postproduction of the film stimuli and the actors. We also thank our student research assistants for their help with the stimulus production and data acquisition. In addition, we would like especially our participants on the autism spectrum for their participation in the study. This work was supported by a Grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG; EXC 302).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cluster of Excellence ‘Languages of Emotion’, Freie Universität Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195, Berlin, Germany

    Gabriela Rosenblau, Dorit Kliemann, Hauke R. Heekeren & Isabel Dziobek

  2. Department of Education and Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195, Berlin, Germany

    Gabriela Rosenblau, Dorit Kliemann & Hauke R. Heekeren

  3. Center for Translational Developmental Neuroscience, Yale Child Study Center, Yale University, 230 S. Frontage Rd., New Haven, CT, 06519, USA

    Gabriela Rosenblau

  4. McGovern Institute for Brain Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 43 Vassar Str, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

    Dorit Kliemann

  5. Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, 149 Thirteenth Street, Charlestown, MA, 02129, USA

    Dorit Kliemann

  6. Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099, Berlin, Germany

    Isabel Dziobek

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  1. Gabriela Rosenblau
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Correspondence to Gabriela Rosenblau.

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Rosenblau, G., Kliemann, D., Heekeren, H.R. et al. Approximating Implicit and Explicit Mentalizing with Two Naturalistic Video-Based Tasks in Typical Development and Autism Spectrum Disorder. J Autism Dev Disord 45, 953–965 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-014-2249-9

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