Integrating intention and context: assessing social cognition in adults with Asperger syndrome

BÁEZ S, MELLONI M, RATTAZZI A, TORRALVA T, GONZÁLEZ-GADEA ML, VIGLIECCA NS, JEAN DECETY J, MANES F, IBÁÑEZ A.

Encuentro; Society for Social Neuroscience Annual Meeting; 2012

Deficits in social cognition are an evident clinical feature of the Asperger syndrome. Although many daily life problems of adults with Asperger syndrome are related to social cognition impairments, few studies have conducted comprehensive research in this area. The current study assessed multiple domains of social cognition in adults with Asperger syndrome. We controlled for the effect of executive functions and explored within-group variability. Fifteen adults diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and 15 matched healthy controls completed a battery of social cognition tasks. This battery included measures of emotion recognition, theory of mind, empathy, moral judgment, social norms knowledge and self-monitoring behavior in social settings. The results indicated that adults with Asperger syndrome had a core deficit in several domains of social cognition. We also found high inter-individual variability in the social cognition tasks. In these tasks, Asperger syndrome participants obtained mostly subnormal performance. Executive functions did not seem to play a major role in the social cognition impairments. Our results also suggest that adults with Asperger syndrome present a pattern of social cognition deficits characterized by the decreased ability to implicitly infer the intentionality of actions and to integrate mental states (intentions, beliefs, emotions) with contextual information. Nevertheless, when social information is explicitly presented or the situation can be navigated with abstract rules, performance is improved. Our findings have important implications for the diagnosis and treatment of Asperger individuals as well as for the neurocognitive models of this syndrome.