A Meeting of Minds: Is Mentalizing Absent in Autism or Dependent Upon Like-Mindedness?

Evidence supporting the influential mentalizing account of autism (that autistic people struggle to spontaneously represent others’ beliefs) has traditionally required autistic people to mentalize about non-autistic people. Yet, we know that individuals mentalize better for people who are like them and autistic people are likely to see non-autistic people as different to themselves. Here, we tested whether an actor’s diagnosis affected the spontaneous mentalizing of autistic and non-autistic adults by recording eye-movements. We found that autistic adults correctly anticipated the actor’s action based on her beliefs only when she was autistic. Conversely, non-autistic adults correctly anticipated her action only when the actor was non-autistic. Thus, the predominantly non-autistic world we inhabit seems to underlie autistic people’s difficulty mentalizing, challenging the idea of a fundamental impairment.