Do autistic adults' brains track others' beliefs differently?
A key 'mind-reading' brain area, the right temporoparietal junction, responded less to another character's false belief in autistic adults than in controls, even though their task behaviour looked the same.
Source
Brain activity for spontaneous and explicit mentalizing in adults with autism spectrum disorder: An fMRI study
Study at a glance
- Design
- Case-control — Autistic vs neurotypical adults scanned with fMRI while doing spontaneous and explicit versions of the Buzz Lightyear ball-detection false-belief task (within-subject task version, between-subject group).
- N
- N=45 · Final fMRI sample: 24 adults with ASD and 21 controls after exclusions from 26 and 25 recruited; behavioural RT analysis used 21 ASD and 20 controls.
- Population
- Right-handed adults aged 19 to 51 with a clinical autism diagnosis, and neurotypical controls, in Belgium
- Outcome
- BOLD activity in a right temporoparietal junction region of interest and whole brain during belief formation; ball-detection reaction times
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What they did
Adults with and without autism watched short cartoons in which Buzz Lightyear either saw or missed a ball moving behind a screen, then pressed a key if the ball was there. In one version participants were never told to think about Buzz's belief (spontaneous), and in a second version catch questions made them track it deliberately (explicit). The researchers measured reaction times and fMRI activity, focusing on a right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) region defined from an independent earlier study.
What they found
Across everyone, the rTPJ was more active when Buzz held a false belief, especially a false belief that the ball was present, and this pattern did not differ between the spontaneous and explicit versions. That content-specific rTPJ boost was significantly smaller in the autism group, in both versions. Whole-brain analysis found only one other group difference (the right anterior temporal pole) and no sign of extra 'compensatory' activity in autistic adults. Reaction times showed the expected belief effect, but it did not differ between groups.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The brain difference did not show up in behaviour, so the study cannot say the weaker rTPJ response actually causes everyday social difficulties. The spontaneous version always came first, so order was not counterbalanced, although the authors report a time covariate did not change the results. The sample was modest and high-functioning (all IQs above 80), several autistic participants scored below the ADOS cut-off, and rTPJ differences did not correlate with symptom severity. The task only required responding to a present ball, which may explain why the region responded mainly to beliefs about presence.
Key terms
- Theory of Mind (mentalizing)
- The ability to represent your own and other people's mental states, such as beliefs, desires and intentions.
- Spontaneous vs explicit mentalizing
- Spontaneous mentalizing is fast, automatic tracking of others' beliefs without being asked; explicit mentalizing is slower, deliberate reasoning about what someone thinks.
- False-belief task
- A task where a character's belief about an object's location becomes wrong because the object moves while they are not watching.
- Temporoparietal junction (TPJ)
- A region where the temporal and parietal lobes meet; the right TPJ is a core node of the brain's mentalizing network.
- Region of interest (ROI) analysis
- Testing brain activity only in a region chosen in advance, here defined from an independent sample, which avoids circular selection.
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Quiz yourself
What made the 'explicit' version of the task explicit?
Common questions
If autistic adults performed the task just as well, why does the brain difference matter?
It suggests the neural machinery for tracking beliefs works differently even when behaviour looks normal, which could help explain real-life social difficulties that simple lab tasks miss, though this study did not directly show that link.
How did the researchers make one version 'spontaneous'?
Catch questions in that version asked about the colour of Buzz's cap rather than his belief, so participants had no reason to think about what he believed; a debriefing confirmed nobody noticed the belief manipulation.
Did autistic adults use other brain areas to compensate in the explicit version?
The researchers looked for this at the whole-brain level and found no evidence of extra compensatory activity in the autism group.
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