Autistic children and adolescents often have greater difficulty engaging in deception than their non-autistic peers. However, deception in autistic adulthood has received little attention to date. This study examined whether autistic and non-autistic adults differed in their inclination to lie in everyday situations and the factors that underpin…

Our behavior is frequently influenced by those around us. However, the majority of social cognition research is conducted using socially isolated paradigms, without the presence of real people (i.e., without a "social presence"). The current study aimed to test the influence of social presence upon a measure of mentalizing behavior in…

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and schizophrenia represent different mental disorders, but intriguing similarities seem to appear.In the present meta-analysis, we examined theory of mind (ToM) impairments in adults with ASD or schizophrenia based on studies that have compared the two patient groups directly by using the same test-battery at the…

This study describes the development and psychometric evaluation of a new self-report measure of social cognition: the Theory of Mind Inventory:Self-Report--Adult (ToMI:SR-Adult). Adults with autism (or a suspicion of autism; n = 111) and typically developing adults (n = 109) completed a demographic questionnaire and the ToMI:SR-Adult online. Both…

'Theory of Mind' (ToM) is the ability to attribute mental states to others to make sense of their behaviour. ToM research has informed understanding of (a)typical social behaviour, including the symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This began with research on ToM in autistic children and there has been a noticeable increase in the study of…

Perspective-taking plays an important role in daily life, allowing consideration of other people's perspectives and viewpoints. This study used a large sample of 265 community-based participants (aged 20-86 years) to examine changes in perspective-taking abilities--a component of "Theory of Mind"--across adulthood, and how these changes…

Two studies addressed key theoretical debates in theory of mind (ToM) development by comparing (a) deaf native signers (n = 18), (b) deaf late signers (n = 59), and (c) age-matched hearing persons (n = 74) in childhood (Study 1: n = 81) and adulthood (Study 2: n = 70) on tests of first- and second-order false belief and conversational sarcasm.…

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and Asperger's Syndrome (AS) share a heterogeneous cognitive profile. Studies assessing executive functions (EF) and social cognition in both groups have found preserved and impaired performances. These inconsistent findings would be partially explained by the cognitive variability reported in these…

Younger and older adults differ in performance on a range of social-cognitive skills, with older adults having difficulties in decoding nonverbal cues to emotion and intentions. Such skills are likely to be important when deciding whether someone is being sarcastic. In the current study we investigated in a life span sample whether there are…

Evidence for successful socio-cognitive training in typical adults is rare. This study attempted to improve Theory of Mind (ToM) and visual perspective taking in healthy adults by training participants to either imitate or to inhibit imitation. Twenty-four hours after training, all participants completed tests of ToM and visual perspective taking.…

Gift-giving involves both the objective value of a gift and the symbolic meaning of the exchange. The objective value is sometimes considered of secondary importance as when people claim, "It's the thought that counts." We evaluated when and how mental state inferences count in gift exchanges. Because considering another's thoughts requires…

Incongruity between a positive statement and a negative context is a cue to verbal irony. Two studies examined whether school-age children and adults recognized that listeners require knowledge of context to detect irony. Specifically, the studies investigated whether participants could inhibit their own context knowledge to appropriately gauge…

In a series of three visual perspective-taking experiments, we asked adult participants to judge their own or someone else's visual perspective in situations where both perspectives were either the same or different. We found that participants could not easily ignore what someone else saw when making self-perspective judgments. This was observed…