Action prediction in autistic and non-autistic observers with perceptual and cognitive load
Bibliographic record
Abstract
According to the broken mirror neuron theory of autism, autistic individuals are less efficient at mapping the behaviors of others onto their own bodily representations, which leads to difficulties in imitating and understanding others’ actions. However, limited research has explored the broken mirror neuron theory within the context of action prediction, the application of action understanding. In a pilot study, I employed a modified version of the pointing task where autistic and non-autistic participants predicted whether a target actor would point to the right or left without knowing that the actors were either instructed or allowed to choose freely where to point. I expanded on the original study by incorporating trials with perceptual or cognitive load. For the former, three actors were shown instead of just one, requiring the observer to respond to the actions of one target actor. For the latter, the observer was required to guess the target actor’s actions by pressing a key that is in the opposite (anti) direction as the target actor’s predicted pointing direction, as opposed to the same (pro) direction. All observers responded faster in the trials where the target actor chose freely where to point, called the choice advantage. However, an analysis of the autistic and non-autistic groups separately indicated that the choice advantage was observed in all experimental conditions in the non-autistic cohort but was reduced to the 1-actor, anti-pointing trials in the autistic group. These results indicate that autistic individuals may not be using body-language cues to predict the actions of others as effectively as non-autistic individuals, while offering a more nuanced perspective on autistic peoples’ understanding of others’ actions than the broken mirror neuron theory.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".