Sampling Utterances and Grammatical Analysis Revised (SUGAR)

Abstract

For TD adolescents, a significant relationship was found between semantic personality traits and episodic AMs, introspection, and mentalizing abilities. For adolescents with ASD, this relationship was not observed. This supports the idea that different aspects of AM and the self may dissociate during development. Individuals with ASD perceived themselves as knowing significantly less about other people’s internal mental states than did TD young people. Somewhat unexpected, however, was the finding that adolescents with ASD perceived someone close to them (typically a family member) as knowing more about their own (ASD participants’) behaviors than themselves, which was in contrast to the comparison group. These findings indicate a distinction between the representation of internal and external personality traits for young people with ASD, such that they perceive themselves as knowing less about their own behaviors than someone close to them. During typical development, a distinction has been proposed between the objective evaluation of behaviors and subjective measurement of mental states, with the former requiring comparative judgments and the latter requiring qualitative judgments. This suggests that for young people with ASD, introspection abilities may vary as a function of objective or subjective evaluation processes. Perceived knowledge of physical (behavioral) aspects of the self may be more impaired than perceived knowledge of psychological (mental state) aspects of the self due to reduced confidence and/ or competence in making comparative judgments about themselves relative to others. Exploring subjective and objective evaluation processes using experimental paradigms for young people with ASD would be of relevance to these discussions. These study findings suggest that although adolescents with ASD are able to reflect and use their own experiences to inform their understanding of themselves and other people, the way in which they derive knowledge about themselves is atypical. Because there is a bidirectional relationship between AM and the self, the authors speculate that difficulties with introspection may also contribute to the atypical specification of AMs and poorer use of the self as an effective memory organizational principle. These difficulties may affect the social and directive functions of AM and may contribute to the problems persons with ASD have in forming social relationships and using past experiences to guide future behaviors and manage change.