Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

A novel image database for social concepts reveals preference biases in autistic spectrum in adults and children

  • Brief Report
  • Published:
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Human beings display the extraordinary ability of grasping and communicating abstract concepts. Yet, no standardized instruments exist to assess this ability. Developing these tools is paramount for understanding abstract representations such as social concepts, with ramifications in educational and clinical settings. Here, we developed an image database depicting abstract social concepts varying in social desirability. We first validated the image database in a sample of neurotypical participants. Then, we applied the database to test different hypotheses regarding how social concepts are represented across samples of adults and children with autism spectrum condition (ASC). Relative to the neurotypicals, we did not observe differences related to ASC in identification performance of the social desirability of the concepts, nor differences in metacognitive ability. However, we observed a preference bias away from prosocial concepts that was linked to individual autistic traits in the neurotypicals, and higher in ASC relative to the neurotypicals both in adults and children. These results indicate that abstract representations such as social concepts are dependent on individual neurodevelopmental traits. The image database thus provides a standardized assessment tool for investigating the representation of abstract social concepts in the fields of psycholinguistics, neuropsychology, neuropsychiatry, and cognitive neuroscience, across different cultures and languages.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12

Similar content being viewed by others

Data Availability

The image database, the associated computer vision model representations and the experimental data are available at https://osf.io/6myaf/

Notes

  1. https://www.kaggle.com/

  2. Can pretrained ImageNet models generalize to sketches?

  3. We compared the identification performance in the odd-one-out task between females and males, and also in connection with the preference biases. The results showed that odd-one-out identification performance was lower in males (mean = 0.515; SD = 0.147) compared to females (mean = 0.612; SD = 0.15) (t(47) = 2.14, \(p = 0.038\), Cohen’s d = 0.652; Mann–Whitney U = 318, \(p = 0.046\)). We also observed that prosocial preference biases were lower in males (mean = 0.825; SD = 0.113) compared to females (mean = 0.897; SD = 0.092) (t(47) = 2.377, \(p = 0.022\); Cohen’s d = 0.724; Mann–Whitney U = 376, \(p = 0.016\)). Interestingly, this pattern of results was observed despite the AQ score being similar between males (mean = 35.875, SD = 8.237) and females (mean = 37.06, SD = 8.61) (t(46) = 0.457, \(p = 0.65\); Mann–Whitney U = 292, \(p = 0.436\)). These analyses were not performed in the children sample since there were only three females in the ASC group.

References

  • Abraham, A., Pedregosa, F., Eickenberg, M., Gervais, P., Mueller, A., Kossaifi, J., ... Varoquaux, G. (2014). Machine learning for neuroimaging with scikit-learn. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, 8, 14.

  • Alcalá-López, D., & Soto, D. (2020). Decoding social knowledge in the human brain. bioRxiv.

  • Anderson, N. H. (1968). Likableness ratings of 555 personality-trait words. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9(3), 272.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Baldwin, S., & Costley, D. (2016). The experiences and needs of female adults with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder. Autism, 20(4), 483–495.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Bargiela, S., Steward, R., & Mandy, W. (2016). The experiences of late-diagnosed women with autism spectrum conditions: An investigation of the female autism phenotype. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 46, 3281–3294.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Baron-Cohen, S. (1997). Mindblindness: An essay on autism and theory of mind. MIT press.

  • Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”? Cognition, 21(1), 37–46.

  • Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Skinner, R., Martin, J., & Clubley, E. (2001). The autism-spectrum quotient (aq): Evidence from asperger syndrome/high-functioning autism, malesand females, scientists and mathematicians. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 31(1), 5–17.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Barsalou, L. W. (2020). Challenges and opportunities for grounding cognition. Journal of Cognition, 3(1).

  • Blair, R. J. R. (1996). Brief report: Morality in the autistic child. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

  • Borghi, A. M., Barca, L., Binkofski, F., & Tummolini, L. (2018). Abstract concepts, language and sociality: From acquisition to inner speech. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 373(1752), 20170134.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Borghi, A. M., Binkofski, F., Castelfranchi, C., Cimatti, F., Scorolli, C., & Tummolini, L. (2017). The challenge of abstract concepts. Psychological Bulletin, 143(3), 263.

  • Borghi, A. M., Mazzuca, C., Da Rold, F., Falcinelli, I., Fini, C., Michalland, A.-H., ... Tummolini, L. (2021). Abstract words as social tools: Which necessary evidence? Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 613026.

  • Carpenter, M., Pennington, B. F., & Rogers, S. J. (2001). Understanding of others’ intentions in children with autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 31(6), 589–599.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • CDC. (2020). Data and statistics on autism spectrum disorder. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

  • Chevallier, C., Kohls, G., Troiani, V., Brodkin, E. S., & Schultz, R. T. (2012). The social motivation theory of autism. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(4), 231–239.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Conca, F., Borsa, V. M., Cappa, S. F., & Catricalà, E. (2021). The multidimensionality of abstract concepts: A systematic review. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 127, 474–491.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Crawford, H., Moss, J., Oliver, C., Elliott, N., Anderson, G. M., & McCleery, J. P. (2016). Visual preference for social stimuli in individuals with autism or neurodevelopmental disorders: An eye-tracking study. Molecular Autism, 7(1), 1–12.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • D’Mello, A. M., Frosch, I. R., Li, C. E., Cardinaux, A. L., & Gabrieli, J. D. (2022). Exclusion of females in autism research: Empirical evidence for a “leaky” recruitment-to-research pipeline. Autism Research, 15(10), 1929–1940.

  • Dapretto, M., Davies, M. S., Pfeifer, J. H., Scott, A. A., Sigman, M., Bookheimer, S. Y., ... Iacoboni, M. (2006). Understanding emotions in others: Mirror neuron dysfunction in children with autism spectrum disorders. Nature Neuroscience, 9(1), 28–30.

  • Dawson, G., Toth, K., Abbott, R., Osterling, J., Munson, J., Estes, A., ... Liaw, J. (2004). Early social attention impairments in autism: Social orienting, joint attention, and attention to distress. Developmental Psychology, 40(2), 271.

  • Deng, J., Dong, W., Socher, R., Li, L.-J., Li, K., & Fei-Fei, L. (2009). Imagenet: A large-scale hierarchical image database. In Proceedings of the ieee conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (pp. 248–255). IEEE.

  • Diedrichsen, J., & Kriegeskorte, N. (2017). Representational models: A common framework for understanding encoding, pattern-component, and representational-similarity analysis. PLoS Computational Biology, 13(4), e1005508.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Dove, G., Barca, L., Tummolini, L., & Borghi, A. M. (2020). Words have a weight: Language as a source of inner grounding and flexibility in abstract concepts. Psychological Research, 1–17.

  • Faul, F., Erdfelder, E., Lang, A.-G., & Buchner, A. (2007). G* power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 39(2), 175–191.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Fisher, G. A., Heise, D. R., Bohrnstedt, G. W., & Lucke, J. F. (1985). Evidence for extending the circumplex model of personality trait language to self-reported moods. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(1), 233.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Fleming, S. M., & Lau, H. C. (2014). How to measure metacognition. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 443.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Gale, C. M., Eikeseth, S., & Klintwall, L. (2019). Children with autism show atypical preference for non-social stimuli. Scientific Reports, 9(1), 1–10.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Grainger, C., Williams, D. M., & Lind, S. E. (2016). Judgment of learning accuracy in high-functioning adolescents and adults with autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 46(11), 3570–3582.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Grainger, C., Williams, D. M., & Lind, S. E. (2016). Metacognitive monitoring and control processes in children with autism spectrum disorder: Diminished judgement of confidence accuracy. Consciousness and Cognition, 42, 65–74.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Grant, C. M., Boucher, J., Riggs, K. J., & Grayson, A. (2005). Moral understanding in children with autism. Autism, 9(3), 317–331.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Hamlin, J. K., & Wynn, K. (2011). Young infants prefer prosocial to antisocial others. Cognitive Development, 26(1), 30–39.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Hamlin, J. K., Wynn, K., & Bloom, P. (2007). Social evaluation by preverbal infants. Nature, 450(7169), 557–559.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Hiller, R. M., Young, R. L., & Weber, N. (2014). Sex differences in autism spectrum disorder based on dsm-5 criteria: Evidence from clinician and teacher reporting. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 42(8), 1381–1393.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Hull, L., Petrides, K., Allison, C., Smith, P., Baron-Cohen, S., Lai, M.-C., ... Mandy, W. (2017). “putting on my best normal”: Social camouflaging in adults with autism spectrum conditions. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47, 2519–2534.

  • Jaswal, V. K., & Akhtar, N. (2019). Being versus appearing socially uninterested: Challenging assumptions about social motivation in autism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 42, e82.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kim, Y. S., Leventhal, B. L., Koh, Y.-J., Fombonne, E., Laska, E., Lim, E.-C., . & Lee, H., et al. (2011). Prevalence of autism spectrum disorders in a total population sample. American Journal of Psychiatry, 168(9), 904–912.

  • Klambauer, G., Unterthiner, T., Mayr, A., & Hochreiter, S. (2017). Self-normalizing neural networks. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30.

  • Kriegeskorte, N., Mur, M., & Bandettini, P. A. (2008). Representational similarity analysis-connecting the branches of systems neuroscience. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 2, 4.

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Król, M. E., & Król, M. (2020). Scanpath similarity measure reveals not only a decreased social preference, but also an increased nonsocial preference in individuals with autism. Autism, 24(2), 374–386.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Lange, K., Kühn, S., & Filevich, E. (2015). “ just another tool for online studies”(jatos): An easy solution for setup and management of web servers supporting online studies. PloS One, 10(6), e0130834.

  • Liu, K.-Y., & Lau, H. (2022). Subjective experiences as nodes within mental disorder networks. Trends in Cognitive Sciences

  • Livingston, L. A., Shah, P., & Happé, F. (2019). Compensatory strategies below the behavioural surface in autism: A qualitative study. The Lancet Psychiatry, 6(9), 766–777.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Lord, C., Rutter, M., DiLavore, P., Risi, S., Gotham, K., & Bishop, S. (2002). Autism diagnostic observation schedule: Ados western psychological services. CA: Los Angeles.

    Google Scholar 

  • Maras, K., Gamble, T., & Brosnan, M. (2019). Supporting metacognitive monitoring in mathematics learning for young people with autism spectrum disorder: A classroom-based study. Autism, 23(1), 60–70.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Matheson, H. E., & Barsalou, L. W. (2018). Embodiment and grounding in cognitive neuroscience. Stevens’ Handbook of Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, 3, 1–27.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mathôt, S., Schreij, D., & Theeuwes, J. (2012). Opensesame: An open-source, graphical experiment builder for the social sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 44(2), 314–324.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Mattila, M.-L., Kielinen, M., Linna, S.-L., Jussila, K., Ebeling, H., Bloigu, R., ... Moilanen, I. (2011). Autism spectrum disorders according to dsm-ivtr and comparison with dsm-5 draft criteria: An epidemiological study. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 50(6), 583–592.

  • McFee, B., Salamon, J., & Bello, J. P. (2018). Adaptive pooling operators for weakly labeled sound event detection. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 26(11), 2180–2193.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). (1996c). Phenomenology of perception (c. smith, trans.)

  • Nicholson, T., Williams, D. M., Lind, S. E., Grainger, C., & Carruthers, P. (2021). Linking metacognition and mindreading: Evidence from autism and dual-task investigations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150(2), 206.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Norman, W. T. (1967). 2800 personality trait descriptors–normative operating characteristics for a university population.

  • Ojala, M., & Garriga, G. C. (2010). Permutation tests for studying classifier performance. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 11(Jun), 1833–1863.

    Google Scholar 

  • Paszke, A., Gross, S., Chintala, S., Chanan, G., Yang, E., DeVito, Z., ... Lerer, A. (2017). Automatic differentiation in pytorch.

  • Paszke, A., Gross, S., Massa, F., Lerer, A., Bradbury, J., Chanan, G., ... Antiga, L., et al. (2019). Pytorch: An imperative style, high-performance deep learning library. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 32, 1.

  • Pedregosa, F., Varoquaux, G., Gramfort, A., Michel, V., Thirion, B., Grisel, O., ... Dubourg, V., et al. (2011). Scikit-learn: Machine learning in python. The Journal of Machine Learning Research, 12, 2825–2830.

  • Pexman, P. M., Diveica, V., & Binney, R. J. (2023). Social semantics: The organization and grounding of abstract concepts. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 378(1870), 20210363.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Posserud, M.-B., Skretting Solberg, B., Engeland, A., Haavik, J., & Klungsøyr, K. (2021). Male to female ratios in autism spectrum disorders by age, intellectual disability and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 144(6), 635–646.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Russell, J., & Hill, E. L. (2001). Action-monitoring and intention reporting in children with autism. The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 42(3), 317–328.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Rwightman, R. (2019). Generalization to imagenet-sketch. Kaggle. Retrieved from https://www.kaggle.com/code/rwightman/generalization-to-imagenet-sketch

  • Ryle, G. (2009). The concept of mind. Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Sawyer, A. C., Williamson, P., & Young, R. (2014). Metacognitive processes in emotion recognition: Are they different in adults with asperger’s disorder? Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 44(6), 1373–1382.

  • Sedgewick, F., Hill, V., & Pellicano, E. (2019). ‘it’s different for girls’: Gender differences in the friendships and conflict of autistic and neurotypical adolescents. Autism, 23(5), 1119–1132.

  • Shulman, C., Guberman, A., Shiling, N., & Bauminger, N. (2012). Moral and social reasoning in autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 42(7), 1364–1376.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Specht, D. F. (1990). Probabilistic neural networks. Neural Networks, 3(1), 109–118.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • van der Plas, E., Mason, D., Livingston, L. A., Craigie, J., Happé, F., & Fleming, S. (2021). Computations of confidence are modulated by mentalizing ability.

  • Villani, C., Lugli, L., Liuzza, M. T., & Borghi, A. M. (2019). Varieties of abstract concepts and their multiple dimensions. Language and Cognition, 11(3), 403–430.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wilkinson, D. A., Best, C. A., Minshew, N. J., & Strauss, M. S. (2010). Memory awareness for faces in individuals with autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 40(11), 1371–1377.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Wilson-Mendenhall, C. D., Barrett, L. F., Simmons, W. K., & Barsalou, L. W. (2011). Grounding emotion in situated conceptualization. Neuropsychologia, 49(5), 1105–1127.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Xie, S., Girshick, R., Dollár, P., Tu, Z., & He, K. (2017). Aggregated residual transformations for deep neural networks. In Proceedings of the ieee conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (pp. 1492–1500).

  • Yosinski, J., Clune, J., Bengio, Y., & Lipson, H. (2014). How transferable are features in deep neural networks? In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (pp. 3320–3328)

Download references

Acknowledgements

D.S. acknowledges support from the Basque government through the BERC 2022-2025 program, from the Spanish State Research Agency, through the ’Severo Ochoa’ Programme for Centres/Units of Excellence in R & D (CEX2020-001010-S) and also from project grant PID2019-105494GB-I00. A.V. and V.P. acknowledge support from the Basque government through the IT1537-22 grant, from the Spanish Research Agency, grant PID2021-122233OB-I00, and from the BBVA Foundation (RILITEA project). A.S. acknowledges support from the Margarita Salas Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities co-funded with European Union funds (NextGenerationEU), project grant PID2019-104506GB-I00 and the Pedagogical Museum of Children’s Art in Madrid. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, San Sebastian, Spain

    David Soto, Patxi Elosegi & Antje Walter

  2. Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain

    David Soto & Agustín Vicente

  3. Department of Artistic Education, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Amaia Salazar

  4. University of the Basque Country- UPV/EHU, Leioa, Spain

    Patxi Elosegi, Antje Walter, Ekaine Rodriguez, Valentina Petrollini & Agustín Vicente

  5. Shenzhen University, Nanshan District, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China

    Ning Mei

Authors
  1. David Soto
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Amaia Salazar
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Patxi Elosegi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Antje Walter
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Ning Mei
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Ekaine Rodriguez
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  7. Valentina Petrollini
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  8. Agustín Vicente
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to David Soto.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

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 file 1 (pdf 6847 KB)

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Soto, D., Salazar, A., Elosegi, P. et al. A novel image database for social concepts reveals preference biases in autistic spectrum in adults and children. Psychon Bull Rev (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02443-7

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02443-7

Keywords

Search

Navigation