Abstract
Impoverished capacity for social inference is one of several symptoms that are common to both agenesis of the corpus callosum (AgCC) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This research compared the ability of 14 adults with AgCC, 13 high-functioning adults with ASD and 14 neurotypical controls to accurately attribute social meaning to the interactions of animated triangles. Descriptions of the animations were analyzed in three ways: subjective ratings, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, and topic modeling (Latent Dirichlet Allocation). Although subjective ratings indicated that all groups made similar inferences from the animations, the index of perplexity (atypicality of topic) generated from topic modeling revealed that inferences from individuals with AgCC or ASD displayed significantly less social imagination than those of controls.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abell, F. F., Happé, F. F., & Frith, U. U. (2000). Do triangles play tricks? Attribution of mental states to animated shapes in normal and abnormal development. Cognitive Development, 15(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0885-2014(00)00014-9
Adolphs, R., Sears, L., & Piven, J. (2001). Abnormal processing of social information from faces in autism. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 13, 232–240. https://doi.org/10.1162/089892901564289
AlSumait, L., Barbará, D., & Domeniconi, C. (2008). On-line LDA: Adaptive topic models for mining text streams with applications to topic detection and tracking. In Proceedings—IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, ICDM (pp. 3–12). shttps://doi.org/10.1109/ICDM.2008.140.
American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-5 (5th ed.). American Psychiatric Association.
Atkins, D. C., Rubin, T. N., Steyvers, M., Doeden, M. A., Baucom, B. R., & Christensen, A. (2012). Topic models: A novel method for modeling couple and family text data. Journal of Family Psychology, 26(5), 816–827. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029607
Badaruddin, D., Andrews, G. L., Bolte, S., Schilmoeller, K. J., Schilmoeller, G., Paul, L. K., & Brown, W. S. (2007). Social and behavioral problems of children with agenesis of the corpus callosum. Child Psychiatry and Human Development, 38, 287–302. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-007-0065-6
Baron-Cohen, S. (1992). Out of sight or out of mind? A naturalistic study of deception in autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 33, 1141–1155. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.1992.tb00934.x
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”? Cognition, 21(1), 37–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(85)90022-8
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A., & Frith, U. (1986). Mechanical, behavioural and intentional understanding of picture stories in autistic children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 4, 113–125. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-835X.1986.tb01003.x
Baron-Cohen, S., O’Riordan, M., Stone, V., Jones, R., & Plaisted, K. (1999). Recognition of faux pas by normally developing children and children with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism (1999). Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 29(5), 407–418. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1023035012436
Blei, D. M. (2012). Probabilistic topic models. Communications of the ACM, 55(4), 77–84. https://doi.org/10.1145/2133806.2133826
Blei, D. M., & Lafferty, J. D. (2006). A correlated topic model of science. The Annals of Applied Science, 1(1), 17–35. https://doi.org/10.1214/07-aoas114
Blei, D. M., Ng, A. Y., & Jordan, M. I. (2003). Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3(4–5), 993–1022. https://doi.org/10.1162/jmlr.2003.3.4-5.993
Brown, W. S., Anderson, L., & Paul, L. (2015). Emotional intelligence in agenesis of the corpus callosum. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, 32(3), 267–279. https://doi.org/10.1093/arclin/acx001
Brown, W. S., Burnett, K., Vaillancourt, A., & Paul, L. K. (2021). Appreciation of social norms in agenesis of the corpus callosum. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology. https://doi.org/10.1093/arclin/acab003
Brown, W. S., Jeeves, M. A., Dietrich, R., & Burnison, D. S. (1999). Bilateral field advantage and evoked potential interhemispheric transmission in commissurotomy and callosal agenesis. Neuropsychologia, 37(10), 1165–1180. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0028-3932(99)00011-1
Brown, W. S., & Paul, L. K. (2000). Cognitive and psychosocial deficits in agenesis of the corpus callosum with normal intelligence. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 5(2), 135–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/135468000395781
Brown, W. S., & Paul, L. K. (2019). The neuropsychological syndrome of agenesis of the corpus callosum. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 25, 324–330. https://doi.org/10.1017/S135561771800111X
Brown, W. S., Paul, L. K., Symington, M., & Dietrich, R. (2005a). Comprehension of humor in primary agenesis of the corpus callosum. Neuropsychologia, 43(6), 906–916. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2004.09.008
Brown, W. S., Symington, M., Van Lancker-Sidtis, D., Dietrich, R., & Paul, L. K. (2005b). Paralinguistic processing in children with callosal agenesis: Emergence of neurolinguistic deficits. Brain and Language, 93(2), 135–139. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2004.09.003
Brown, W. S., Thrasher, E. D., & Paul, L. K. (2001). Interhemispheric Stroop effects in partial and complete agenesis of the corpus callosum. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 7, 302–311. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355617701733048
Burger-Caplan, R., Saulnier, C., Jones, W., & Klin, A. (2016). Predicting social and communicative ability in school-age children with autism spectrum disorder: A pilot study of the Social Attribution Task, Multiple Choice. Autism, 20(8), 952–962. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361315617589
Castelli, F., Frith, C., Happé, F., & Frith, U. (2002). Autism, Asperger syndrome and brain mechanisms for the attribution of mental states to animated shapes. Brain, 125(8), 1839–1849. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awf189
Castelli, F., Happé, F., Frith, U., & Frith, C. (2000). Movement and mind: A functional imaging study of perception and interpretation of complex intentional movement patterns. NeuroImage, 12(3), 314–325. https://doi.org/10.1080/13607863.2010.513038
Craig, J., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2000). Story-telling ability in children with autism or Asperger Syndrome: A window into the imagination. Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences, 37(1), 64–70.
Craig, J., Baron-Cohen, S., & Scott, F. (2001). Drawing ability in autism: A window into the imagination. Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences, 38(3–4), 242–253.
Crespi, B., Leach, E., Dinsdale, N., Mokkonen, M., & Hurd, P. (2016). Imagination in human social cognition, autism, and psychotic-affective conditions. Cognition, 150, 181–199. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2016.02.001
Critchley, H. D., Daly, E. M., Bullmore, E. T., Williams, S. C. R., Van Amelsvoort, T., Robertson, D. M., Rowe, A., Phillips, M., McAlonan, G., Howlin, P., & Murphy, D. G. (2000). The functional neuroanatomy of social behaviour: Changes in cerebral blood flow when people with autistic disorder process facial expressions. Brain: A Journal of Neurology, 123(11), 2203–2212. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/123.11.2203
Davis, P. E., Simon, H., Meins, E., & Robins, D. L. (2018). Imaginary companions in children with autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 48, 2790–2799. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3540-y
Erickson, R. L., Paul, L. K., & Brown, W. S. (2014). Verbal learning and memory in agenesis of the corpus callosum. Neuropsychologia, 60, 121–130. https://doi.org/10.1016/2014.06.003
Francis M. E., & Pennebaker J. W. (1993). LIWC: Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. Southern Methodist University.
Ferretti, F., Adornetti, I., Chiera, A., Nicchiarelli, S., Valeri, G., Magni, R., Vicari, S., & Marini, A. (2018). Time and narrative: An investigation of storytelling abilities in children with autism spectrum disorder. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 944. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00944
Garrels, S. R. (2004). Divergent thinking and abstract problem solving in children and adults with agenesis of the corpus callosum. Doctoral Dissertation. Retrieved from Proquest Dissertations and Theses database. Order number 3124710.
Gepner, B., Deruelle, C., & Grynfeltt, S. (2001). Motion and emotion: A novel approach to the study of face processing by young autistic children. Journal of Autism Developmental Disorders, 31(1), 37–45. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005609629218
Griffiths, T. L., & Steyvers, M. (2004). Finding scientific topics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of USA, 101(Supplement 1), 5228–5234.
Heerey, E. A., Keltner, D., & Capps, L. M. (2003). Making sense of self-conscious emotion: Linking theory of mind and emotion in children with autism. Emotion, 3(4), 394–400.
Heider, F., & Simmel, M. (1944). An experimental study of apparent behavior. American Journal of Psychology, 57, 243–259. https://doi.org/10.2307/1416950
Hines, R. J., Paul, L. K., & Brown, W. S. (2002). Spatial attention in agenesis of the corpus callosum: Shifting attention between visual fields. Neuropsychologia, 40, 1804–1814. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0028-3932(02)00032-5
Hobson, R. (1993). Autism and the development of mind. L. Erlbaum Associates.
Hobson, R., Ouston, J., & Lee, A. (1988). Emotion recognition in autism: Coordinating faces and voices. Psychological Medicine, 18(04), 911. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0033291700009843
Humphreys, K., Minshew, N., Leonard, G., & Behrmann, M. (2007). A fine-grained analysis of facial expression processing in high-functioning adults with autism. Neuropsychologia, 45(4), 685–695. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2006.08.003
Jinkins, J. R., Whitmore, A. R., & Bradley, W. G. (1989). Magnetic resonance imaging of callosal and corticocallosal dysgenesis. American Journal of Neuroradiology, 10(2), 339–344. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/38f7/aa5adc4b2f8c4fc62b7c61308d0e9a8314b7.pdf.
Kang, C. H. (2008). Mental state attribution in agenesis of the corpus callosum versus high functioning autism. Doctoral Dissertation. Available from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database 304412195.
Klin, A. (2000). Attributing social meaning to ambiguous visual stimuli in high-functioning autism and Asperger syndrome: The Social Attribution Task. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 41, 831–846.
Klin, A., & Jones, J. (2006). Attributing social and physical meaning to ambiguous visual displays in individuals with higher-functioning autism spectrum disorders. Brain and Cognition, 61(1), 40–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2005.12.016
Kramer, J. H., Mungas, D., Possin, K. L., Rankin, K. P., Boxer, A. L., Rosen, H. J., Bostrom, A., Sinha, L., Berhel, A., & Widmeyer, M. (2013). NIH EXAMINER: Conceptualization and development of an executive function battery. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 20(1), 11–19. https://doi.org/10.1017/81355617713001094
Lau, J. H., Grieser, K., Newman, D., & Baldwin, T. (2010). Automatic Evaluation of Topic Coherence. Paper presented at the meeting Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association Computational Linguistics. Los Angeles, CA.
Lau, Y. C., Hinkley, L. B., Bukshpun, P., et al. (2013). Autism traits in individuals with agenesis of the corpus callosum. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 43(5), 1106–1118. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-012-1653-2
Liu, L., Tang, L., Dong, W., Yao, S., & Zhou, W. (2016). An overview of topic modeling and its current applications in bioinformatics. SpringerPlus, 5(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40064-016-3252-8
Lord, C., Leventhal, B. L., & Cook, E. H., Jr. (2001). Quantifying the phenotype in autism spectrum disorders. American Journal of Medical Genetics, 105(1), 36–38.
Marco, E. J., Harrell, K. M., Brown, W. S., Hill, S. S., Jeremy, R. J., Kramer, J. H., Sherr, E. H., & Paul, L. K. (2012). Processing speed delays contribute to executive function deficits in individuals with agenesis of the corpus callosum. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 18(3), 521–529. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355617712000045
Mazefsky, C. A., & Oswald, D. P. (2007). Emotion perception in Asperger’s syndrome and high-functioning autism: The importance of diagnostic criteria and cue intensity. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 37(6), 1086–1095. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-006-0251-6
Mizuno, A., Liu, Y., Williams, D. L., Keller, T. A., Minshew, N. J., & Just, M. A. (2011). The neural basis of deictic shifting in linguistic perspective-taking in high-functioning autism. Brain, 134(8), 2422–2435. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awr151
Ozonoff, S., Pennington, B. F., & Rogers, S. J. (1990). Are there emotion perception deficits in young autistic children? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 31(3), 343–361. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.1990.tb01574.x
Paul, L. K., Brown, W. S., Adolphs, R., Tyszka, J. M., Richards, L. J., Mukherjee, P., & Sherr, E. H. (2007). Agenesis of the corpus callosum: Genetic, developmental and functional aspects of connectivity. Nature Reviews: Neuroscience, 8(4), 287–299. https://doi.org/10.1038/nm2017
Paul, L. K., Corsello, C., Kennedy, D. P., & Adolphs, R. (2014). Agenesis of the corpus callosum and autism: A comprehensive comparison. Brain, 137, 1813–1829. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awu070
Paul, L. K., Erikson, R., Hartman, J., & Brown, W. S. (2016). Memory functioning in individuals with agenesis of the corpus callosum. Neuropsychologia, 86, 183–192.
Paul, L. K., Lautzenhiser, A., Brown, W. S., Hart, A., Neumann, D., Spezio, M., & Adolphs, R. (2006). Emotional arousals in agenesis of the corpus callosum. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 61(1), 47–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2005.10.017
Paul, L. K., Schieffer, B., & Brown, W. S. (2004). Social processing deficits in agenesis of the corpus callosum: Narratives from the Thematic Apperception Test. Archive of Clinical Neuropsychology, 19(2), 215–222. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0887-6177(03)00024-6
Paul, L. K., Van Lancker-Sidtis, D., Schieffer, B., Dietrich, R., & Brown, W. S. (2003). Communicative deficits in agenesis of the corpus callosum: Nonliteral language and affective prosody. Brain and Language, 85(2), 313–324. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0093-934X(03)00062-2
Pelphrey, K. A., Sasson, N. J., Reznick, J., Paul, G., Goldman, B. D., & Piven, J. (2002). Visual scanning of faces in autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 32(4), 249–261. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016374617369
Pennebaker, J. W., Boyd, R. L., Jordan, K., & Blackburn, K. (2015). The development and psychometric properties of LIWC2015. University of Texas at Austin.
Pennebaker, J. W., Francis, M. E., & Booth, R. J. (2001). Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC): LIWC2001. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Piggot, J., Kwon, H., Mobbs, D., Blasey, C., Lotspeich, L., Menon, V., et al. (2004). Emotion attribution in high-functioning individuals with autistic spectrum disorder: A functional imaging study. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 43(4), 473–480. https://doi.org/10.1097/00004583-200404000-00014
Rehmel, J. L., Brown, W. S., & Paul, L. K. (2016). Proverb comprehension in individuals with agenesis of corpus callosum. Brain and Language, 160, 21–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2016.07.001
Rump, K. M., Giovannelli, J. L., Minshew, N. J., & Strauss, M. S. (2009). The development of emotion recognition in individuals with autism. Child Development, 80(5), 1434–1447. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01343.x
Samson, A. C., Huber, O., & Gross, J. J. (2012). Emotion regulation in Asperger’s syndrome and high-functioning autism. Emotion, 12(4), 659–665. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027975
Symington, S. H., Paul, L. K., Symington, M. F., Ono, M., & Brown, W. S. (2010). Social cognition in individuals with agenesis of the corpus callosum. Social Neuroscience, 5(3), 296–308. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470910903462419
Ten Eycke, K. D., & Müller, U. (2018). Drawing links between the autism cognitive profile and imagination: Executive function and processing bias in imaginative drawings by children with and without autism. Autism, 22(2), 149–160. https://doi.org/10.1177/136236131668293
Thiébaut, F., White, S., Walsh, A., Klargaard, S., Wu, H. C., Rees, G., & Burgess, P. (2016). Does faux pas detention in adult autism reflect differences in social cognition or decision-making abilities? Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorder, 46(1), 103–112. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-015-2551-1
Turk, A., Brown, W. S., Symington, M., & Paul, L. K. (2010). Social narratives in agenesis of the corpus callosum: Linguistic analysis of the Thematic Apperception Test. Neuropsychologia, 48(1), 43–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsycholgia.2009.08.009
Wang, A. T., Lee, S. S., Sigman, M., & Dapretto, M. (2006). Developmental changes in the neural basis of interpreting communicative intent. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 1(2), 107–121. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsl018
Wechsler, D. (1997). WAIS-III: Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (3rd ed.). The Psychological Corporation.
Wechsler, D. (1999). Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence. The Psychological Corporation.
White, S., Coniston, D., Rogers, R., & Frith, U. (2011). Developing the Frith-Happé Animations: A quick and objective test of theory of mind for adults with autism. Autism Research, 4(2), 149–154. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.17
Young, C. M., Folsom, R. C., Paul, L. K., Su, J., Mangum, R., & Brown, W. S. (2019). Social cognition in agenesis of the corpus callosum: Computational linguistic analysis of the awareness of consequences scale. Neuropsychology, 33(2), 275–284. https://doi.org/10.1037/neu0000512
Zalla, T., Sav, A. M., Stopin, A., Ahade, S., & Leboyer, M. (2009). Faux pas detection and intentional action in Asperger Syndrome. A replication on a French sample. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 9(2), 373–382. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-008-0634-y
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Dr. Ralph Adolphs and Brian Cheng for assisting with recruitment and testing of ASD participants. This research was funded in part by a Grant from Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01HD092430 (LP). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. Portions of this manuscript were included in the doctoral dissertations of CK and TR.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
LP and WB designed the study. LP and CK collected the data. CK and FC administered standard scoring, MG applied Topic Modeling, and TR applied LIWC. TR, MG, CK, LP and WB analyzed the data. All authors contributed to the manuscript.
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Information
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Supplementary file1 (MOV 2863 kb)
Supplementary file2 (MOV 1623 kb)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Renteria-Vazquez, T., Brown, W.S., Kang, C. et al. Social Inferences in Agenesis of the Corpus Callosum and Autism: Semantic Analysis and Topic Modeling. J Autism Dev Disord 52, 569–583 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-021-04957-2
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-021-04957-2