Seeing minds – a signal detection study of agency attribution along the autism-psychosis continuum
Permanent link
https://hdl.handle.net/10037/25986Date
2022-05-17Type
Journal articleTidsskriftartikkel
Peer reviewed
Author
Lisøy, Rebekka Solvik; Biegler, Robert; Ebad Fardzadeh, Haghish; Veckenstedt, Ruth; Moritz, Steffen; Pfuhl, GeritAbstract
Methods - Participants from the general population (N = 300) and psychotic patients (N=26) judged the absence or presence of a chase during five-second long displays of seemingly randomly moving dots. Hypermentalising is seeing a chase where there is none, whereas hypomentalising is missing to see a chase.
Results - Psychotic-like experiences were associated with hypermentalising. Autistic traits were not associated with hypomentalising, but with a reduced ability to discriminate chasing from non-chasing trials. Given the high correlation (τ = .41) between autistic traits and psychotic-like experiences, we controlled for concomitant symptom severity on agency detection. We found that all but those with many autistic and psychotic traits showed hypomentalising, suggesting an additive effect of traits on mentalising. In the second study, we found no hypermentalising in patients with psychosis, who performed also similarly to a matched control group.
Conclusions - The results suggest that hypermentalising is a cognitive bias restricted to subclinical psychotic-like experiences. There was no support for a diametrically opposite mentalising bias along the autism-psychosis continuum.