Altered social touch interpretation in autism is specific to somatosensory experience

Abstract Tactile experiences are central to social communication and relationship formation, yet are often altered in autism spectrum conditions (ASC). We investigated whether ASC is associated with differences in the interpretation and affective evaluation of social touch. ASC participants ( n = 117) and neurotypical controls ( n = 117) either directly experienced or observed standardized social touch gestures representing interpersonal interactions. Autistic traits were associated with altered interpretation of social meaning during tactile experience, but not observation, and with lower pleasantness ratings in both conditions, particularly for felt touch. Comparisons between ASC and control participants mirrored these findings. In the viewed-touch experiment, open-ended responses closely matched forced-choice results, indicating that interpretations were robust to response format. Together, these findings suggest that autism is associated with alterations in social and affective touch processing, with the strongest effects occurring during direct tactile experience.