Attributing Social Meaning to Ambiguous Visual Stimuli in Higher-functioning Autism and Asperger's Syndrome, The Social Attribution Task

Klin, A. (2000)

This paper presents a social cognition procedure - the Social Attribution Task (SAT) - that reduces factors thought to facilitate ToM task performance without facilitating real-life social functioning. Sixty participants with autism (N=20), AS (N=20), and normally developing adolescents and adults (N=20) with normative IQs were asked to provide narrative describing Heider and Simmel’s (1944) silent cartoon animation in which geometric shapes enact a social plot. These narratives were coded in terms of the participants’ abilities to attribute social meaning to a geometric cartoon. The SAT provides reliable and quantified scores of seven indices of social cognition. Results revealed marked deficits in both clinical groups across all indices. These deficits were not related to verbal IQ or level of metalinguistics skills. Individuals with autism and AS identified about a quarter of the social elements in the story, a third of their attributions were irrelevant to the social plot, and they used pertinent ToM terms very infrequently. They were also unable to derive psychologically based personality features form the shapes’ movements. When provided with more explicit verbal information on the nature of the cartoon, individuals with AS improved their performance slightly more than those with autism, but not significantly so.

This paradigm was created by Hieder and Simmel (1944) in their classic studies of social attribution. They presented a silent movie to college students in which geometric shapes moved in a contingent fashion. The movements of the shapes cannot be easily described without the use of anthropomorphic words, because of the compelling impact on the viewer that human actions take place e.g. the actors chase, fight, entrap, play with one another, get frightened or elated or frustrated. In the study, all but 1 0f 34 students described the movie in human terms.

Whereas the typical child was using the fundamentals of social relationships to attribute meaning to the ambiguous visual display, the child with autism was using the fundamentals of physical relationships to do the same. They were both viewing the same display, but their minds appeared to be searching for different kinds of principles, social and physical, respectively.

The fact that the HFA and AS participants were sensitive to only one quarter of the social elements of the cartoon could suggest that when coming face to face with a complex social situation - say, a high school cafeteria - they might be able to identify only a small number of important cues required for creating the social context of that setting. Failing to do so might place them at great disadvantage when having to predict other people’s intentions and to select responses that will be appropriate to the social demands of that situation. This observation supports the emphasis placed by social skills training programs on promoting increased awareness of social cues in the environment by training individuals with autism to search for social information (eg. Gray, 1995).

Translated into a naturalistic setting, the fact that one third of the HFA and AS participants’ narratives were relevant would very likely cause a series of communication breakdowns if these persons were, for example, conversing about the cartoon with another person.