Autistic people outperform neurotypicals in a cartoon version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes.
Liam Cross, Andrea Piovesan, Gray Atherton
PMID 35855595WHAT IT FOUND
Autistic adults matched neurotypicals on the standard Reading the Mind in the Eyes test but outperformed them on a cartoon version.
Neurotypicals scored worse on cartoons, while autistic performance remained consistent across both formats.
Key findings
01Autistic adults scored higher than neurotypicals on the cartoon version of the emotion recognition task.
02Neurotypicals performed significantly worse on the cartoon task compared to the standard human-photograph task.
03There was no significant difference in performance between autistic and neurotypical groups on the standard human-photograph task.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample was heavily skewed towards females (71.9% of total participants), which may have boosted autistic performance given known female advantages in this task. Diagnoses were self-reported and confirmed only by the participant's statement that a medical professional had made them, without clinical verification. No data was collected on intelligence, comorbidities, or symptom severity, which are known to influence social cognition test performance. The study relied on an online convenience sample recruited via autism forums, which may not represent the broader autistic population.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest and no financial interest to report.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the autistic outperformance on cartoons as evidence that they are generally better at reading emotions. The neurotypical group performed poorly on cartoons, and the autistic group's performance did not improve relative to their own baseline on human photos, suggesting the result reflects a lack of human-specific bias in NTs rather than a superior social skill in autistic people.