The way others move can influence what we choose

Autistic adults benefit from and enjoy learning via social interaction as much as neurotypical adults do

BACKGROUND

Autistic people show poor processing of social signals (i.e. about the social world). But how do they learn via social interaction?

METHODS

68 neurotypical adults and 60 autistic adults learned about obscure items (e.g. exotic animals) over Zoom (i) in a live video-call with the teacher, (ii) from a recorded learner-teacher interaction video and (iii) from a recorded teacher-alone video. Data were analysed via analysis of variance and multi-level regression models.

RESULTS

Live teaching provided the most optimal learning condition, with no difference between groups. Enjoyment was the strongest predictor of learning: both groups enjoyed the live interaction significantly more than other condition and reported similar anxiety levels across conditions.

LIMITATIONS

Some of the autistic participants were self-diagnosed-however, further analysis where these participants were excluded showed the same results. Recruiting participants over online platforms may have introduced bias in our sample. Future work should investigate learning in social contexts via diverse sources (e.g. schools).

CONCLUSIONS

These findings advocate for a distinction between learning about the social versus learning via the social: cognitive models of autism should be revisited to consider social interaction not just as a puzzle to decode but rather a medium through which people, including neuro-diverse groups, learn about the world around them. Trial registration Part of this work has been pre-registered before data collection https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/5PGA3.

Your action does matter to me: Examining the role of the co-actor's action-effects in resolving the self-other discrimination problem

Sharing a task with another person can introduce the need to discriminate representations that refer to our own action from that of the other person's. The current understanding is that information about the stimulus event drives the self-other discrimination process, as it promotes (via the reactivation of feature codes) the representation that encodes the corresponding action. However, this mechanistic explanation relies on experimental situations in which stimulus event information (e.g., spatial location) is always and directly available. Thus, it remains unclear whether and how we could successfully discriminate between self- and other related action representations in the absence of such information. The present study addressed this unanswered question using a novel joint Simon task-based paradigm. We report the results of three experiments in which we manipulated the availability of stimulus event information into the contralateral space. Our findings demonstrate that participants are able to compensate for the absence of stimulus event information by relying on temporal features of their co-actor's action-effects (Experiment 1). Even more surprising was that participants continued to monitor the temporal features of their co-actor's actions even when given a verbal signal by their co-actor (Experiments 2a), or full access to the common workspace (Experiment 2b). Our results are strong evidence that the representation of actions is not purely stimulus driven. They suggest that the temporal dimension of the other person's actions is able to drive the self-other discrimination process, in the same way as other perceptual dimensions and feature codes that are shared with the stimulus event.

Dynamic emotional expressions do not modulate responses to gestures

The tendency to imitate the actions of others appears to be a fundamental aspect of human social interaction. Emotional expressions are a particularly salient form of social stimuli (Vuilleumier & Schwartz, 2001) but their relationship to imitative behaviour is currently unclear. In this paper we report the results of five studies which investigated the effect of a target's dynamic emotional stimuli on participants' tendency to respond compatibly to the target's actions. Experiment one examined the effect of dynamic emotional expressions on the automatic imitation of opening and closing hand movements. Experiment two used the same basic paradigm but added gaze direction as an additional factor. Experiment three investigated the effect of dynamic emotional expressions on compatibility responses to handshakes. Experiment four investigated whether dynamic emotional expressions modulated response to valenced social gestures. Finally, experiment five compared the effects of dynamic and static emotional expressions on participants' automatic imitation of finger lifting. Across all five studies we reliably elicited a compatibility effect however, none of the studies found a significant modulating effect of emotional expression. This null effect was also supported by a random effects meta-analysis and a series of Bayesian t-tests. Nevertheless, these results must be caveated by the fact that our studies had limited power to detect effect sizes below d = 0.4. We conclude by situating our findings within the literature, suggesting that the effect of emotional expressions on automatic imitation is, at best, minimal.