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  1. How Easy is it to Read the Minds of People with Autism Spectrum Disorder?
    Sheppard E, Pillai D, Wong GT, Ropar D, Mitchell P
    J Autism Dev Disord, 2016 Apr;46(4):1247-54.
    PMID: 26603886 DOI: 10.1007/s10803-015-2662-8
    How well can neurotypical adults' interpret mental states in people with ASD? 'Targets' (ASD and neurotypical) reactions to four events were video-recorded then shown to neurotypical participants whose task was to identify which event the target had experienced. In study 1 participants were more successful for neurotypical than ASD targets. In study 2, participants rated ASD targets equally expressive as neurotypical targets for three of the events, while in study 3 participants gave different verbal descriptions of the reactions of ASD and neurotypical targets. It thus seems people with ASD react differently but not less expressively to events. Because neurotypicals are ineffective in interpreting the behaviour of those with ASD, this could contribute to the social difficulties in ASD.
  2. Using other minds as a window onto the world: guessing what happened from clues in behaviour
    Pillai D, Sheppard E, Ropar D, Marsh L, Pearson A, Mitchell P
    J Autism Dev Disord, 2014 Oct;44(10):2430-9.
    PMID: 24710812 DOI: 10.1007/s10803-014-2106-x
    It has been proposed that mentalising involves retrodicting as well as predicting behaviour, by inferring previous mental states of a target. This study investigated whether retrodiction is impaired in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Participants watched videos of real people reacting to the researcher behaving in one of four possible ways. Their task was to decide which of these four "scenarios" each person responded to. Participants' eye movements were recorded. Participants with ASD were poorer than comparison participants at identifying the scenario to which people in the videos were responding. There were no group differences in time spent looking at the eyes or mouth. The findings imply those with ASD are impaired in using mentalising skills for retrodiction.
  3. Fulltext Relationship between autonomic arousal and attention orienting in children and adolescents with ADHD, autism and co-occurring ADHD and autism
    Bellato A, Arora I, Kochhar P, Ropar D, Hollis C, Groom MJ
    Cortex, 2023 Sep;166:306-321.
    PMID: 37459680 DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2023.06.002
    INTRODUCTION: Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) may be characterized by different profiles of visual attention orienting. However, there are also many inconsistent findings emerging from the literature, probably due to the fact that the potential effect of autonomic arousal (which has been proposed to be dysregulated in these conditions) on oculomotor performance has not been investigated before. Moreover, it is not known how visual attention orienting is affected by the co-occurrence of ADHD and autism in people with a double diagnosis.

    METHODS: 99 children/adolescents with or without ADHD and/or autism (age 10.79 ± 2.05 years, 65% boys) completed an adapted version of the gap-overlap task (with baseline and overlap trials only). The social salience and modality of stimuli were manipulated between trials. Eye movements and pupil size were recorded. We compared saccadic reaction times (SRTs) between diagnostic groups and investigated if a trial-by-trial association existed between pre-saccadic pupil size and SRTs.

    RESULTS: Faster orienting (shorter SRT) was found for baseline compared to overlap trials, faces compared to non-face stimuli and-more evidently in children without ADHD and/or autism-for multi-modal compared to uni-modal stimuli. We also found a linear negative association between pre-saccadic pupil size and SRTs, in autistic participants (without ADHD), and a quadratic association in children with ADHD (without autism), for which SRTs were slower when intra-individual pre-saccadic pupil size was smallest or largest.

    CONCLUSION: Our findings are in line with previous literature and indicate a possible effect of dysregulated autonomic arousal on oculomotor mechanisms in autism and ADHD, which should be further investigated in future research studies with larger samples, to reliably investigate possible differences between children with single and dual diagnoses.

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