Reading Minds in Stories: Neural Dynamics of Affective Perspective-Taking Skills in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders

PURPOSE: Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is characterized by prominent difficulties with affective perspective-taking, which have been mainly investigated through autistic individuals' behavioral and electrophysiological responses to emotional pictorial stimuli. It seems likely that non-verbal pictorial tasks lack the discourse or situational context related to the emotional viewpoint of other individuals. Narratives, on the other hand, involve strong contextual information signaling the subjective viewpoints of other characters. To date, no electrophysiological marker of affective perspective-taking in ASD has been reported for narrative paradigms. The current study aimed to provide electrophysiological and behavioral evidence of the affective perspective-taking skills in ASD employing a narrative task. METHODS: Thirty-four autistic children and typically-developing peers performed an affective perspective-taking task while listening to stories with two protagonists involved in an offender-victim relationship. During the task, emotion attribution and late positive potentials of the children were recorded to assess emotional processing in reaction to adopting three perspectives, specifically, those of the observer/self, offender and victim. RESULTS: Autistic children showed attenuated late positive potential amplitudes as compared to their typically-developing peers when adopting the viewpoints of the offender and the victim, but not the observer's/self's. In terms of emotion attribution, the autistic group did so less appropriately and discriminately than the typically-developing group across the three perspectives. CONCLUSION: The findings provide behavioral and psychophysiological support for distinctive affective-perspective skills in autistic children, with the self-perspective being relatively more preserved.