Intention Attribution in Children and Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An EEG Study.
Magdalena Schütz, Sara Boxhoorn, Andreas M Mühlherr and 3 others
PMID 34859338WHAT IT FOUND
Children with autism matched typical peers on predicting story endings, but brain scans showed they worked harder to process unexpected ones.
This suggests intention attribution is intact behaviorally, while neural responses to surprise differ.
Key findings
01Behavioral sensitivity for distinguishing congruous from incongruous endings did not differ between groups.
02No significant main or interaction effects were found for mean amplitude during the observation of the 3rd image.
03In the ASD group, incongruous endings caused a significantly stronger negative component than congruous endings in the parietal clusters.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample size was relatively small, which may have obscured smaller effects. The lack of significant findings in the early ERP components may be due to the younger age of the participants, as social brain areas are still maturing. The study design required participants to withhold responses until after the image presentation, which may have altered natural processing patterns. Only male participants were heavily represented, limiting generalizability to females with ASD.
Declared interests
The study was funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme and Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main. No specific conflicts of interest regarding commercial entities were declared in the provided text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the lack of behavioral differences as evidence that social communication challenges in ASD are solely due to motivation or anxiety. The neural data shows that while the outcome is correct, the processing of unexpected social information is different and potentially more effortful for children with ASD.