Wu, Ruihan; (2024) Modulating Mental State Decoding and Reasoning in Autism: The Importance of Context. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Autism affects social cognition in many ways, including mentalizing and perception. This thesis is particularly interested in studying false-belief reasoning and smile perception in autism by using a variety of measurement methods including eye-tracking, fNIRS, and behavioural assessments. Moreover, there are limited studies that look at factors that may improve autistic people’s performance in mentalizing and social cue perception. Contextual factors hold promise in altering mentalizing performance, as has been found in non-autistic adults, but has not been explored in autistic people. There are two major themes in my PhD. The first theme is to investigate whether implicit mentalizing plays a role in autistic cognition. Through adapting an existing anticipatory-looking paradigm for measuring implicit mentalizing in autistic adults; I found autistic adults perceive social cues in the same way as non-autistic adults, but this information is not then used to update mental representations. I also found mentalizing, compensation, and mental health are associated with each other using another modified implicit mentalizing paradigm in a genetically predisposed population and a non-autistic sample. And, mothers of autistic children reported poorer mental health than mothers of non-autistic children. The second theme is to explore how contextual information (i.e., evaluative context and intergroup bias) would modulate mentalizing by using both the anticipatory-looking paradigm and a genuine-posed smile discrimination task, as well as the corresponding neural mechanism using fNIRS. I found autistic adults are equally affected by contextual information, but tend to possess difficulties in mental state decoding and reasoning and are less likely to identify with their in-group than their non-autistic counterparts. These findings extend the current understanding of mentalizing abilities in autism. The thesis will be discussed together with the current theories in mentalizing, intergroup bias, double empathy problem, and social mimicry.

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