Do animated triangles reveal a marked difficulty among autistic people with reading minds?
Alexander C Wilson
PMID 33618541WHAT IT FOUND
Autistic people scored lower than non-autistic people on all types of animated shapes, not just social ones.
The gap was slightly wider for social animations, but the difference was small. This suggests general difficulty interpreting motion may contribute more than a specific inability to read minds.
Key findings
01Autistic people showed less normative interpretations on all animation types, with small effect sizes for random and goal-directed movements and a medium effect size for mentalising animations.
02When compared to the goal-directed control, the additional difficulty with mentalising animations was small.
03Evidence of publication bias was found, meaning the actual effect sizes may be smaller than reported.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The studies included only participants with average-range general ability, so results may not apply to autistic people with intellectual disability. There was significant heterogeneity in effect sizes across the included studies. Evidence of publication bias suggests the reported differences may be inflated. The task itself may not have strong construct validity as a pure measure of mentalising, as performance correlates with general motion processing tasks.
Declared interests
The author received no financial support and declared no potential conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the medium effect size on social animations as evidence of a marked, specific deficit in mentalising. The similar small deficits on non-social animations indicate that general difficulties with interpreting motion or narrative structure likely contribute to the poor performance.