Communicative misalignment in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Harshali Wadge, Rebecca Brewer, Geoffrey Bird, Ivan Toni, Arjen Stolk*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

8 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Communication deficits are a defining feature of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), manifest during social interactions. Previous studies investigating communicative deficits have largely focused on the perceptual biases, social motivation, cognitive flexibility, or mentalizing abilities of isolated individuals. By embedding autistic individuals in live non-verbal interactions, we characterized a novel cause for their communication deficits. Adults with ASD matched neurotypical individuals in their ability and propensity to generate and modify intelligible behaviors for a communicative partner. However, they struggled to align the meaning of those behaviors with their partner when meaning required referencing their recent communicative history. This communicative misalignment explains why autistic individuals are vulnerable in everyday interactions, which entail fleeting ambiguities, but succeed in social cognition tests involving stereotyped contextual cues. These findings illustrate the cognitive and clinical importance of considering social interaction as a communicative alignment challenge, and how ineffective human communication is without this key interactional ingredient.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)15-26
Number of pages12
JournalCortex
Volume115
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2019

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was supported by a Rubicon grant from the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research NWO ( 446-14-007 ) and a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellowship from the European Union ( 658868 ) awarded to A.S. We are grateful to the study participants and Loes Bijl for helping with the classification of behaviors.

Funding Information:
This work was supported by a Rubicon grant from the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research NWO (446-14-007) and a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellowship from the European Union (658868) awarded to A.S. We are grateful to the study participants and Loes Bijl for helping with the classification of behaviors.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Elsevier Ltd

Keywords

  • Conceptual alignment
  • Human communication
  • Mentalizing
  • Social interaction
  • Theory of mind

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
  • Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
  • Cognitive Neuroscience

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