Retrieval effects of observationally acquired stimulus-response bindings in participants with high and low autistic traits

It is often assumed that individuals with an autism-spectrum disorder (ASD) should perform worse than control participants in behavioural tasks for which mental (co-)representation of observed actions is essential. Empirical findings are inconsistent, at least when compatibility-based measures were obtained with automatic imitation (Brass et al., 2000) or joint Simon paradigms (Sebanz et al., 2003). It is to be noted that both paradigms are facing a set of challenges, which renders their ASD-specific findings as inconclusive. The present study sought to employ a paradigm that allows the study of mental representation of observed actions and at the same time is unaffected by the challenges both the automatic imitation task (i.e., irresponsiveness to social modulations) and the joint Simon task (i.e., referential coding as alternative explanation) are confronted with. We investigated whether retrieval of observationally acquired stimulus-response bindings are impaired in participants with high (compared to low) autistic traits. In an extreme group comparison, participants with high versus low autistic traits worked through an observational SR binding and a standard SR binding task (to control for general deficits in cognitive performance). As expected, groups did not differ with regard to retrieval of transient bindings between stimuli and self-performed responses (standard SR binding & retrieval effects). Against our expectations, the same was true for the retrieval of observationally acquired SR bindings, which was of comparable magnitude in both high and low autistic trait groups. Our findings therefore argue against the view that imitative effects are reduced when autistic trait expression is high. Implications for further research on mental representation of (observed) actions in autistic traits and the autism spectrum disorder are discussed.

常有人认为患有自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的个体在那些依赖观察到的行为心理（共）表征的行为任务中表现应劣于对照组参与者。实证研究结果并不一致，至少在采用基于兼容性的指标，并通过自动模仿（Brass et al., 2000）或联合西蒙范式（Sebanz et al., 2003）获得时是这样的。值得注意的是，这两种范式均面临一系列挑战，使得其在自闭症谱系障碍特定方面的发现尚无定论。本研究旨在采用一种范式，既能研究观察到的行为的心理表征，同时不受自动模仿任务（即对社交调节的无反应性）和联合西蒙任务（即指称编码作为替代解释）所面临的挑战的影响。我们调查了观察获得刺激-反应绑定在具有高（相对于低）自闭症特质个体中是否存在损害。在极端组比较中，具有高与低自闭症特质的参与者分别完成了观察性SR绑定和标准SR绑定任务（以控制认知表现的一般性缺陷）。正如预期的那样，两组在刺激与自我执行反应之间的短暂绑定检索方面没有差异（标准SR绑定与检索效应）。出乎意料的是，观察获得的SR绑定检索也是如此，在高与低自闭症特质组中具有相当大的相似性。因此，我们的发现反驳了当自闭症特质表达度高时模仿效应会降低的观点。关于自闭症特质和自闭症谱系障碍中（观察到的）行为心理表征的进一步研究的影响被讨论。