Do autistic adults spontaneously reason about belief? A replication study

To overcome the criticisms of earlier work using anticipatory-looking paradigms to investigate implicit mentalizing in autism, Wu et al. (2024) recently presented a multi-trial paradigm with matched true-belief and false-belief conditions. This study is a replication of Wu et al.’s work using a novel set of stimuli and a separate group of participants, all of whom were naïve to this paradigm. Fifty-four (26 autistic) participants completed an implicit mentalizing task with both high- and low-demand false-belief conditions with two corresponding true-belief control conditions, alongside an explicit mentalizing task. In accordance with Wu et al. (2024), our findings support the presence of spontaneous mentalizing difficulties in autistic adults, despite strong explicit mentalizing abilities. Therefore, we provide further evidence that whilst some autistic adults with high-IQs may have developed compensatory strategies that mask mentalizing difficulties on explicit tasks, implicit tasks reveal differences in the underlying spontaneous mechanism.