The Theory of Mind deficit theory

Several theories have been proposed to explain autistic traits and behavior in the socio-communicative domain, traditionally framed as impairments. Arguably, the most impactful has been Baron-Cohen et al. (Reference Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith1985) attempt to attribute them to a deficit in Theory of Mind (ToM), whose role in communication is debated in pragmatic literature but central in autism research. Although several other accounts have been published, explaining autistic differences in pragmatic comprehension as hinged on more general linguistic and cognitive abilitiesFootnote ³ , the ToM deficit account is still one of the most cited, particularly in pragmatics research. The “Theory of Mind hypothesis of autism” was and is still seen by some scholars as a unified explanation for the core diagnostic features of autism (Tager-Flusberg, Reference Tager-Flusberg, Burack, Charman, Yirmiya and Zelazo2001), at least in terms of social and communicative difficulties. Said proposal attributed these to a lack of ability to infer other people’s mental states, beliefs, and emotions and consequently read their behavior through these lenses. The first studies investigated ToM abilities in autistic children through false-belief tasks (such as the now famous Sally-Ann task), where a character of a story falsely believes that an object is placed somewhere, while participants know that it has been moved and it is now elsewhere. Though neurotypical children tend to answer correctly to questions about where this character thinks the object is (distinguishing between their view and its representation in the character’s mind) by the age of four (Wellman et al., Reference Wellman, Cross and Watson2001), Baron-Cohen and colleagues found that most autistic children (though not all) with the same intellectual and verbal abilities did not pass the task: this led to describe the theory as having “the potential to explain both lack of pretend play and social impairment by virtue of a circumscribed cognitive failure” (Baron-Cohen et al., Reference Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith1985).

It is comprehensible, though unfortunate, that early works on this topic would suffer from outdated views and language choices. However, even more recent publications on the matter still hold the dehumanizing flavor mentioned earlier. Baron-Cohen starts his review on ToM and autism, published in 2000, quoting Whiten and stating that “A theory of mind remains one of the quintessential abilities that makes us human,” then proceeds to state how its impairment “seems to be universal” in autism. This “universal” deficit entails the inability to infer “the full range of” mental states, such as desire, belief, intention, imagination, and emotion, which, in turn, can cause difficulties in pragmatic tests and correlate with real-life social skills (Baron-Cohen, Reference Baron-Cohen2000: 177–178).

More complex and recent models of ToM, such as the developmental model of ToM presented by Tager-Flusberg (Reference Tager-Flusberg, Burack, Charman, Yirmiya and Zelazo2001), were proposed to enhance the theory and possibly explain how some autistic people would pass ToM tasks. Such a model posits that a distinction must be made between a basic social-perceptual component of ToM (referring to the immediate judgment of others’ mental states, on the basis on their appearance, voices, and movement) and a social-cognitive component (referring to more complex inferences, that require the integration of information on others’ mental states across different events). However, autism would still be seen as involving “fundamental deficits” in the social-perceptual component of ToM, even later in life, as attested by tasks measuring the ability to attribute mental states or intentions from the eyes (the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test) or ambiguous visual stimuli (Klin et al., Reference Klin, Schultz, Cohen, Baron-Cohen, Tager-Flusberg and Cohen2000). From this developmental perspective, difficulties in the social-cognitive component (primarily attested by results from false-belief tasks) would therefore grow from those in social perception. Autistic children who passed the false-belief tasks might then be doing so “hacking out a solution,” through a different path that does not build on the social-perceptual component, but either relies on language or logical reasoning only (Tager-Flusberg, Reference Tager-Flusberg, Burack, Charman, Yirmiya and Zelazo2001). Some evidence in favor of this hypothesis can be found in brain-imaging studies finding that ToM stories did not activate areas in the medial frontal cortex in autistic adults (as compared to neurotypical adults), while they activated frontal regions involved in more general cognitive processing (Happé et al., Reference Happé, Ehlers, Fletcher, Frith, Johansson, Gillberg, Dolan, Frackowiak and Frith1996).

This brief overview on the classic view on ToM in autism already suggests some of the issues that will be raised in the present paper: the complexity of ToM as a construct, the variety of models and tasks to account for and measure its different components, and the tendency, in autism literature, to look for an explanation for good autistic performance in ToM tasks in terms of hacks and compensatory strategies rather than actual competence. The following section expands on these issues exploring the main criticisms this classic view received up to now.

Criticism, recent reflections, and counter-evidence

There are several streams of criticism to this narrative of a universal deficit of ToM in autism and the ways it has been put forward. The first comes from a closer look at the actual results and the refinements of some of the tests used in autism research. The second lies in the epistemic posture toward ToM as a construct in research on the general population and in autism research. The third resides in the suggested explanations for results that are not in line with the expected impairment. The fourth and last regards the effects of the lack of involvement of the autistic community, in terms of task creation and “accuracy” measures, lack of data on autistic adults, and alternative theories of autistic ToM.

Starting from the first, while the idea of a universal ToM deficit in autism prompted a wealth of studies, early experimental evidence demonstrated that some autistic people did pass the original ToM task, leading to the development of more and more advanced ToM tasks and, even, removal from some tests of items on which autistic participants proved to obtain similar performances as compared to the controls, supposedly trying to increase the sensitivity of the test (Chevallier, Reference Chevallier, Slater and Quinn2012). This was the case of the 2007 edition of the “Reading the Mind in the Voice task,” which had items that in the 2002 version triggered similar performances across neurotypes removed. As Chevallier (Reference Chevallier, Slater and Quinn2012) argues, the updated task is arguably a better tool for distinguishing the autistic versus neurotypical groups, but it should no longer be considered a ToM test. Nevertheless, the authors interpret the findings obtained through the new task as evidence that autistic people have “greater difficulties recognizing complex emotions and mental states” (Golan et al., Reference Golan, Baron-Cohen, Hill and Rutherford2007: 1102). Ableist bias toward autistic people influenced the field to the point that subsequent studies were so strongly based on the assumption that autistic people have a ToM impairment and that tests not revealing it were/are considered unsuitable rather than revealing of said bias (Rajendran & Mitchell, Reference Rajendran and Mitchell2007: 229). Taking this into account, there has been considerable evidence in the last decades that the hypothesis of a universal deficit of ToM in autism is untenable (Gernsbacher & Yergeau, Reference Gernsbacher and Yergeau2019). In fact, as mentioned earlier, some autistic children did pass the first-order false-belief tasks in the earliest research (Baron-Cohen et al., Reference Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith1985), and even second-order false-belief tasks that were created as a consequence (Bowler, Reference Bowler1992). Autistic children were also found to perform similarly to neurotypical children on tasks involving simpler mental states, such as intentions (Carpenter et al., Reference Carpenter, Pennington and Rogers2001). Moreover, research on older autistic children (Happé, Reference Happé1995) and adolescents (Scheeren et al., Reference Scheeren, de Rosnay, Koot and Begeer2013) brought evidence that autistic people can pass both false-belief and social stories tasks if tested later in life, possibly highlighting the role of verbal ability or, simply, different developmental trajectories in their ToM development. Recent brain-imaging studies on autistic adults performing false-belief tasks even found similar activation patterns as compared to a neurotypical group (Dufour et al., Reference Dufour, Redcay, Young, Mavros, Moran, Triantafyllou, Gabrieli and Saxe2013). Lastly, even in those cases where difficulties are actually found, other constructs and abilities (such as vocabulary and grammar) seem to explain them better than ToM itself (see Gernsbacher & Yergeau, Reference Gernsbacher and Yergeau2019 for a review). These findings call for a reflection on claims of a universal ToM deficit in autism, as well as, possibly, for a reconsideration of ToM as a construct (as will be argued further in the manuscript).

Second, ToM and empathy tests and constructs are heavily discussed in neurotypical research, for instance, while this has only rarely been done for autism research (Fletcher-Watson & Bird, Reference Fletcher-Watson and Bird2020). False beliefs, for instance, have been described as inherently difficult for children regardless of representation of another person’s mind (Bloom & German, Reference Bloom and German2000; Riggs et al., Reference Riggs, Peterson, Robinson and Mitchell1998). Nevertheless, they are still widely used in autistic development research. The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test, which is frequently used in autism research with adult participants (as seen in the previous section), has been critiqued for its poor internal consistency (Olderbak et al., Reference Olderbak, Wilhelm, Olaru, Geiger, Brenneman and Roberts2015) as well as recognized as a measure of emotion recognition and not of mental states attribution (Turner & Felisberti, Reference Turner and Felisberti2017). While mental states attribution is undisputedly a core part of ToM, which is vastly measured by false-belief tasks in developmental research, emotion recognition (i.e., the ability to perceive and distinguish emotions that other people display) is usually considered part of social cognition but distinct from ToM (Fitzpatrick et al., Reference Fitzpatrick, Frazier, Cochran, Mitchell, Coleman and Schmidt2018). Claiming ToM deficits on the basis of performance in emotion recognition tasks is methodologically unsound as it could lead to the interpretation of difficulties in other areas as pertaining to ToM. In fact, ToM, emotion recognition, and empathy dimensions can dissociate from one another (Oakley et al., Reference Oakley, Brewer, Bird and Catmur2016). Moreover, emotion recognition tasks may vary in terms of abilities that they actually measure depending on the way people display their emotions in the task, which can either be through their facial expressions (in which case it would arguably be testing, at its core, facial expression discrimination) or their voice (in which case it would test prosodic information discrimination); the way these relate to the ability to ascribe others’ mental states is unclear (Quesque & Rossetti, Reference Quesque and Rossetti2020). In fact, the use of emotion recognition tasks to test ToM is part of a broader conceptual issue within social cognition and ToM research in particular. The term ToM itself is often used interchangeably with others, such as mindreading, mentalizing, but also mind perception, and, even, social intelligence. The use of these terms most probably reflects a slightly different conceptualization of the construct (Schaafsma et al., Reference Schaafsma, Pfaff, Spunt and Adolphs2015). Thus, several scholars call for an urgent conceptual clarification in the field, possibly involving hierarchies of involvement and requirements (Quesque & Rossetti, Reference Quesque and Rossetti2020), or, even, a systematic deconstruction of the construct into its component processes, and subsequent reconstruction, with the ultimate aim to also individuate better-performing testing strategies (Schaafsma et al., Reference Schaafsma, Pfaff, Spunt and Adolphs2015). Examples of these components could include perceptual individuation and categorization of social stimuli, interoceptive signals, semantic knowledge, executive and motivational processes, that is, basic processes that should be measurable through known instruments and, ideally, identified with specific neural structures. However, the identification of such components is not an easy task, as it is only clear that they should involve social contents and specific computational features. Moreover, these would still not capture all of ToM, but if combined they would constitute intermediate levels, in a hierarchical scheme, toward ToM as a whole.

The necessity of a revision of both the tasks used and the construct itself has been partially confirmed by recent empirical works. Warnell and Redcay (Reference Warnell and Redcay2019), for instance, administered various ToM measures to preschoolers, school-aged children, and adults and found that these tasks showed minimal correlations with each other, for all ages considered. Navarro (Reference Navarro2022) even assessed the structure of ToM psychometrically, confirming that ToM tasks do not test a single ToM construct. Taken together, these results suggest that ToM should be viewed as a complex rather than a monolithic construct and as a multidimensional process that interacts with other abilities. The path toward a clear and shared description of the construct and a sound selection of instruments to test is long and complex. When it comes to autism research, however, most of these issues are not raised.

Third, when the results of a study do not reflect the expectation of an impairment, the subsequent hypothesis or suggested explanation is that we should not interpret surface-level performance as actual competence, framing autistic strategies as “alternative” or in terms of “compensation.” Livingston et al. (Reference Livingston, Colvert, Bolton and Happé2019), for instance, tested autistic adolescents on various cognitive tasks, as well as the ADOS test and a ToM test, and classified as “High Compensators” participants who had good ADOS scores and low performance in the ToM test (while “Low Compensators” had similar performance in the ToM test and low ADOS scores). Corbett et al. (Reference Corbett, Schwartzman, Libsack, Muscatello, Lerner, Simmons and White2021) classified their autistic participants in the same way in a study investigating the impact of sex and “compensatory strategies” on a set of socio-cognitive measures and defined compensation as “a component of camouflaging in which an individual’s observed behavior is considerably better than actual ability.” In both studies, “High Compensators” are described as showing more typical (i.e., “stronger”) social communication. The concept of compensation itself suggests a supposed superiority of the typical strategies, framed as “normal.” This is by no means limited to psycholinguistics literature, nor is it a prerogative of autism research. In any stream of psychology, neurotypical strategies are considered not just the most typical, but the right ones, to which any other is compared and otherized. Moreover, neurotypical strategies are framed, for the sake of comparison, as a single standard route to comprehension, losing insights on both individual differences and cognitive diversity. Individual differences in ToM are widely considered in neurotypical developmental literature, as children under the age of four show huge performance variability and a consistent developmental progression, so that relatively recent proposals consider ToM tasks to be on a scale, for preschoolers, where diverse desire tasks are passed earlier than false-belief tasks (Wellman & Liu, Reference Wellman and Liu2004). Moreover, performance in these tasks can also correlate with individual differences in tests of other cognitive functions, such as executive control (Carlson & Moses, Reference Carlson and Moses2001), or even social individual differences, such as sociability (usually as measured by teachers’ judgments; Apperly, Reference Apperly2012). However, this conceptual perspective on ToM is difficult to implement in research on older children and adults, as “higher order” false-belief tasks, for instance, place higher demands on working memory and executive functions, and other tasks, as mentioned earlier, arguably measure different constructs. Nevertheless, as Apperly (Reference Apperly2018) notes, even at the higher level, we can still distinguish between different processes, and individual differences among comprehenders may produce variability in their ability to successfully engage each process: “the likelihood that others’ mental states will be inferred, stored, or used depends upon dispositional characteristics of the participants, their motivation, and their cognitive resources” (Apperly, Reference Apperly2018). This is known and progressively taken into account in neurotypical research on ToM abilities, and it reflects on pragmatic research as well: it is highly plausible that the cognitive resources neurotypical adults recruit for pragmatic disambiguation vary on the basis of individual differences: for instance, the comprehender’s ability and/or propensity to mentalize seem to predict how much they rely on others’ mental states in indirect speech acts comprehension (Trott & Bergen, Reference Trott and Bergen2018) and to influence their reliance on ToM abilities even for understanding standardized indirect forms where ToM would not be expected to be necessary (Marocchini & Domaneschi, Reference Marocchini and Domaneschi2022).

The attention to individual differences however fades in clinical works addressing differences between groups. Neurotypical strategies as well as lower and higher order processes are conflated as opposed to deficits in the autistic population, to which the neurotypical population constitutes a control group, whenever they differ. In case they do not in fact differ, however, researchers tend to state autistic participants put in place different strategies and usually call them “compensatory strategies,” as mentioned earlier. In this regard, Zalla and Korman (Reference Zalla and Korman2018) argue that the term “compensation” should be considered “a misnomer,” as it implies that the strategy in place to compensate for ToM abilities would be completely distinct and irrelevant to ToM abilities. However, these strategies usually entail domain-general cognition, which is a relevant component for ToM in typically developing children as well (Korman et al., Reference Korman, Voiklis and Malle2015). Drawing on literature from neurotypical populations that has been partially shown here as well, Zalla and Korman (Reference Zalla and Korman2018) underline how inferences from general event schemas and prior knowledge, executive functions, and episodic memory are sometimes demanded by ToM tasks and can even play a crucial role in real-world ToM problems, thus making “compensatory” strategies core, rather than distinct, elements of ToM capacity.

Lastly, a huge issue confounding autism research is the scarce involvement of autistic people, both as conscious participants of legal age and as researchers, which can cause a variety of problems. With regard to autistic people as participants in research, there is a blatant focus on development: autistic people get older, but autism research still largely conceptualizes them as children, whose ToM abilities are investigated in detail, while the outcomes of this ability in adulthood are yet to be properly addressed (Livingston et al., Reference Livingston, Carr and Shah2019). Recent works on relatively older autistic people, however, seem to suggest that ToM abilities in autism improve already in preschool years (Happé, Reference Happé1995) and in adolescence, as mentioned earlier (Scheeren et al., Reference Scheeren, de Rosnay, Koot and Begeer2013). However, research on ToM in adulthood posits several issues in terms of validity of the tasks, as previously discussed, even in the neurotypical population. With regard to autism, however, the scarcity of research on adults reflects the conceptualization of the spectrum as a neurodevelopmental condition, rather than a lifelong neurotype. For the same reason, research on older adults is even more rarely conducted. However, recent studies suggest that neurotypical age-related differences are reduced or parallel, rather than increased, in autistic people: this suggests that autism might even be a protective factor against age-related decline of cognitive functions (Lever & Geurts, Reference Lever and Geurts2016).

With regard to the lack of autistic researchers, it can affect both task creation and hypothesis development. In fact, most ToM tasks measure ToM in terms of “accuracy” in target trials of mental state inference. In these cases, it is neurotypical researchers who decide what kind of answer can be considered as “accurate”: not only this reflects the normative approach we mentioned in the introduction but it allows for ableist bias toward autistic participants, as there is evidence that neurotypical people tend to rate autistic people less favorably than neurotypical people, especially when they only meet them once (which is usually what happens in data collections), regardless of disclosure of the diagnosis (Sasson et al., Reference Sasson, Faso, Nugent, Lovell, Kennedy and Grossman2017), which is nevertheless usually disclosed in research settings. Moreover, these studies currently rely on tasks that use “neurotypically derived mental states,” given that stories and script writers, as well as actors in videos, are neurotypical (Livingston et al., Reference Livingston, Carr and Shah2019). This constitutes a limit that could hold the scientific community back from other promising hypotheses, such as the one presented in the following paragraph.

From the unitary pragmatic deficit to specific pragmatic impairments

As a core element of social communication, pragmatics has been thoroughly investigated in the autistic population. Pragmatic competence has traditionally been considered as the ability to comprehend the speaker’s meaning in context through a mechanism of intention recognition. As such, it has long been framed in psycholinguistics research as a sub-module of ToM, specific for pragmatic processing but evolved from mindreading abilities (Sperber & Wilson, Reference Sperber and Wilson2002). Other accounts on the relationship between ToM and pragmatics have been put forward, proposing more complex views of pragmatics as relying more on linguistic, ToM, and other cognitive abilities depending on the task and the population (Bosco et al., Reference Bosco, Tirassa and Gabbatore2018). Nevertheless, the role of ToM in pragmatics and particularly in the context of autism research is still central. In the same vein as research on ToM in autism, then, literature in experimental pragmatics has risen from the biased root of a presumed unitary pragmatic deficit in the autistic population.

Starting from early research on autistic pragmatic competence, most studies suggest that autistic people exhibit problems with several pragmatic phenomena, such as figurative language and irony (Happé, Reference Happé1993), the recognition of Gricean maxims violation (Surian, Reference Surian1996), turn-taking (Curcio & Paccia, Reference Curcio and Paccia1987), indirect requests (MacKay & Shaw, Reference MacKay and Shaw2004; Paul & Cohen, Reference Paul and Cohen1985) and humor (Ozonoff & Miller, Reference Ozonoff and Miller1996). Taken together, the most cited studies on pragmatics in autism build a clear narrative of pragmatics as impaired in the autistic population, with particular regard to figurative language. As Kissine (Reference Kissine2021) puts it in an interesting commentary on autism and constructionism, “the entire autism spectrum” would be “robustly characterized by lifelong disabilities in intersubjective communication and persistent difficulties in adopting the perspective of other people.” Similarly to what we have already seen for ToM research, pragmatics literature reaches heights of dehumanization, such as discussing “specifically human forms of social engagement” that autistic people would not be capable of (Hobson, Reference Hobson2012).

Criticism, recent reflections, and counter-evidence

The four streams of criticism mentioned for works on the universal deficit in ToM hold for the unitary pragmatic impairment as well. The first is a debate on the actual results of research on pragmatics in autism, looking at a wider range of phenomena and at more recent studies. The second deals with theoretical and methodological issues in research on figurative language in autism. The third recalls the explanation for unexpectedly good performances in ToM tasks, but with regard to pragmatics. The fourth lies in the scarce dedication to test alternative theories, proposed by autistic researchers.

First, recent research in pragmatics suggests that several pragmatic abilities are “preserved” in autism, such as lexical ambiguity resolution through contextual clues (Brock et al. Reference Brock, Norbury, Einav and Nation2008), scalar implicatures derivation (Chevallier et al., Reference Chevallier, Wilson, Happé and Noveck2010; Hochstein et al., Reference Hochstein, Bale and Barner2017), indirect requests comprehension (Kissine et al., Reference Kissine, Cano-Chervel, Carlier, Brabanter, Ducenne, Pairon, Deconinck, Delvenne and Leybaert2015; Marocchini et al., Reference Marocchini, Di Paola, Mazzaggio and Domaneschi2022), and deception detection (van Tiel et al., Reference van Tiel, Deliens, Geelhand, Murillo Oosterwijk and Kissine2021). Thus, evidence against a universal pragmatic impairment in autism can be found even in research aimed at testing the expected deficit in autistic people’s performance as compared to a neurotypical control group. These results are nevertheless usually explained as either due to exceptions applicable to a small subgroup of the spectrum only, to particularly ecological paradigms, or to compensation strategies.

Second, there are several issues with both the methods and the theory behind research works in the subfield. Pragmatic research in atypical development holds on to inappropriate tests for language abilities, too: despite early warnings against the use of one test to identify language-matched controls for autism research (Tsai & Beisler, Reference Tsai and Beisler1984), most developmental research on autism still relies on a single vocabulary test to do so. In most cases, this is also considered to be a measure of language comprehension, rather than a mere test of vocabulary knowledge. Sometimes, no language measures are collected, and they are assumed on the basis of participants’ IQs. However, there is evidence that IQ and language abilities can dissociate in the autistic population (Bigler et al., Reference Bigler, Mortensen, Neeley, Ozonoff, Krasny, Johnson, Lu, Provencal, McMahon and Lainhart2007; Kjelgaard & Tager-Flusberg, Reference Kjelgaard and Tager-Flusberg2001). Once language comprehension abilities are taken into account, several studies suggest that only children who have a language disability, regardless of their neurotype, have difficulties understanding idioms and metaphors, and drawing inferences from stories (Norbury, 2004, Reference Norbury2005; Norbury & Bishop, Reference Norbury and Bishop2002). From a more theoretical point of view, findings from various studies seem to suggest that pragmatic abilities are independent of ToM abilities (Bosco et al., Reference Bosco, Tirassa and Gabbatore2018), therefore attacking the underlying hypothesis of most pragmatic research in autism: that it should be impaired because ToM is. In fact, pragmatic abilities seem to be trainable despite stable and atypical ToM abilities (Gabbatore et al., Reference Gabbatore, Longobardi and Bosco2022), though most research on pragmatics in autism suffers from the same blatant focus on development as research on ToM in autism.

Third, as in ToM research, pragmatics studies frequently call for compensation as an explanation of unexpected “preserved” abilities. For instance, van Tiel et al. (Reference van Tiel, Deliens, Geelhand, Murillo Oosterwijk and Kissine2021) hypothesize that autistic people succeed in deception only “through conscious and effortful reasoning about other people’s perspective.” Colich et al. (Reference Colich, Wang, Rudie, Hernandez, Bookheimer and Dapretto2012) went as far as attributing autistic participants’ higher activity in left medial prefrontal activity during sarcasm detection to compensatory mechanisms, though lower activity was attributed to a deficit. As Gernsbacher and Pripas-Kapit (Reference Gernsbacher and Pripas-Kapit2012) put it, “When non-autistic persons exceed autistic persons in left medial prefrontal activity during sarcasm detection, it’s due to an autistic deficit. And when autistic persons exceed non-autistic persons, it is due to an autistic deficit.” Another interesting turn in research on pragmatics in autism is the tendency to consider autism to be a test for the role of cognitive functions in specific pragmatic phenomena, as autistic people cannot take their conversational partner’s perspective, so the pragmatic tasks that they succeed at would be those that do not need perspective-taking to unfold (see Andrés-Roqueta & Katsos, Reference Andrés-Roqueta and Katsos2017; Kissine, Reference Kissine2021). In this line of research, experimental paradigms tend to compare a group of autistic participants and a control group, as in ToM research. As a result, not only individual differences in autism are rarely taken into account but also neurotypical people are assumed to use a single, unified strategy in understanding pragmatic phenomena, which we know is rarely the case, starting from development (Matthews et al., Reference Matthews, Biney and Abbot-Smith2018). Recent research by Alkire et al. (Reference Alkire, McNaughton, Yarger, Shariq and Redcay2022) proposed an observational rating measure of ToM with both a negative scale (addressing ToM-related violations of neurotypical conversation norms) and a positive scale (addressing explicit mental state language and perspective-taking), which the authors used while observing naturalistic conversations between autistic and typically developing youth in three dyad types (i.e., both cross-neurotype and neurotype-matched dyads). Not only the two scales were uncorrelated, in line with recent research calling for distinct components of ToM (Schaafsma et al., Reference Schaafsma, Pfaff, Spunt and Adolphs2015; Warnell & Redcay, Reference Warnell and Redcay2019), but also autistic people did not differ from the neurotypical group on the positive scale, while they were rated higher on the negative scale. This seems to suggest that once autistic people are evaluated in conversations with other autistic people and with finer-grained measures, the data reveal a more nuanced picture of their relative strengths and difficulties with specific neurotypical conversational norms. In this case, even though they violated neurotypical norms more than the neurotypical group, they displayed “typical levels of other forms of mental state representation.”

Lastly, the raising number of contributions from autistic academics and participatory research enriched the field with new perspectives focusing on differences rather than impairments, considering autistic people as equal conversation partners, and drawing hypotheses on communication difficulties between neurotypes rather than within a specific neurotype, in line with the double empathy problem (Milton, Reference Milton2012). Williams and colleagues, in particular, worked on its potential application to mutual (mis)understanding in pragmatics under a relevance-theoretic framework and through empirical research (Williams, Reference Williams2021; Williams et al., Reference Williams2021). Given that Relevance Theory sees communication as fundamentally based on shared and mutually recognized relevance, difficulties in cross-neurotype communication could be due to a mismatch in perceived saliency between neurotypes, which would make mutual understanding more effortful for both groups. The authors conducted a linguistic ethnographic study on a small sample that seem to confirm this intuition: when the conversation featured two autistic participants, “flow, rapport, and intersubjective attunement were significantly increased” (Williams et al., Reference Williams2021). However, these works are rarely cited in the subfield. Similarly to what we have seen for ToM research, the lack of involvement of autistic researchers and of autistic people in participatory research tends to result in the use of “neurotypically derived” measures of successful and felicitous communication, as well as expectations of impairment in the autistic population. In fact, while experimental pragmatics is shifting toward a view of pragmatic and cognitive abilities in terms of individual differences, sometimes even tackling concepts such as co-constructed discourse and meaning negotiation, research on pragmatics in autism seems to conceptualize communication as a monolithic phenomenon that can either be done right or wrong, where comprehension in a given task is expected to follow the same route for everyone and any other route or strategy is compensatory and presupposes a deficit in autism. Moreover, there is a tendency in pragmatic research to perpetuate stereotypes of impaired pragmatics in autism without citing relevant studies in order to paint the whole picture, as testified by uneven citation patterns even in special issues focusing on a specific pragmatic topic (Gernsbacher & Pripas-Kapit, Reference Gernsbacher and Pripas-Kapit2012), although, of course, some scholars admit that “empirically speaking, the data are neither clear nor consistent enough for making strong claims about what exactly are the communicative challenges of highly verbal autistic individuals” (Mazzarella & Noveck, Reference Mazzarella and Noveck2021).

Other factors influencing retention of outdated views of ToM and pragmatics in autism

Overall, the main reason behind the composite situation of autism research and interpretation of results is probably to be ascribed to the existence of different streams of literature involving autistic researchers, frequently adjacent to literature from the disability studies and critical autism studies streams, or predominantly, if not only, neurotypical researchers, mainly focused on earlier psychological literature and normative approaches to atypical communication. In this second stream, contributions from autistic academics are hardly ever known and cited, at least in the most prominent works. However, two other factors might be influencing retention of these outdated views of autism. First, looking at studies on aging and obsolescence of scientific literature might suggest a possible explanation. In fact, despite the steady trend of digitalization of scientific journals, authors tend to cite more older rather than newer literature. In a study conducted on the matter by Google Scholar’s researchers, cited papers being at least 10 years older than the paper citing them have significantly increased between 1990 and 2013, from 28% to 36% (Verstak et al., Reference Verstak, Acharya, Suzuki, Henderson, Iakhiaev, Lin and Shetty2014).

Second, as briefly mentioned in the introduction, previous diagnostic criteria might have shaped the prototypical and dominant view of autism as a “severe” condition characterized by the series of impairments we have overviewed here. Results collected from samples selected according to those criteria are still influencing an otherwise growing body of literature which evolved along with changes to the diagnostic criteria. Moreover, the transdisciplinary nature of psycholinguistics as a field might render the synthesis of diagnostic and observational data more complex and difficult for researchers with a background that did not involve extensive study and training on the Autism Spectrum.

Suggestions for future research

In light of these considerations, it would be important for researchers in the field to try and move on from older views of autism by reading and citing newer (hopefully, also increasingly autistic-led) literature, and in case we need to cite early and stigmatizing literature, we might develop more detailed reporting strategies, both distancing ourselves from dehumanizing statements and specifying changes in diagnostic criteria from one paper to the other. Ideally, it would be preferable to always state the specific diagnosis of the sample of any article cited in our literature reviews and report more accurately on additional intellectual and language disabilities that are not, per se, specific to autism. When conducting new research, controlling for these variables would be critical, and, as mentioned earlier, it also seems to be relevant, if not necessary, to create tests that are not “neurotypically derived,” or, at least, to control for ableist bias in neurotypical coding of autistic responses, possibly through the examination of the correspondence between, for instance, multiple-choice and verbal responses in socio-cognitive tasks, as suggested by Livingston et al. (Reference Livingston, Colvert, Bolton and Happé2019), or by including autistic people in our research designs.

It would also seem to be wise to keep in mind some of the issues mentioned earlier in terms of construct and task validity while conducting autism research, too, and to avoid claiming universal deficits in an unclear construct (as well as to describe it as one of the abilities that makes us human while claiming said deficits in a group of humans). It would be advisable to start thinking about cross-neurotype communication in terms of co-construction of meaning and conversation, and of observation of both cross-neurotype and neurotype-matched dyads: studying cross-neurotype interaction is and will always be relevant, but it can and should be done from a more balanced point of view, while also investigating further how autistic people communicate with one another.

Another option would be to conduct more research through different lenses or frameworks, such as within enactive and interactional frameworks, focusing on the interaction rather than on the individuals’ cognitive, and more specifically mindreading, abilities, and operations. Bottema-Beutel (Reference Bottema-Beutel2017) provides an initial description of autistic social interaction within these frameworks, describing interactional coordination, interactional priorities, and enactment of meaning of autistic people. Though this kind of research primarily focused on people having at least near-full spoken language vocabularies, it seems to provide a good general idea of difficulties as well as competence of autistic people in conversational interactions and would be worthy of further investigation.

Increasing inclusion of autistic people at all research stages would also be ideal, though probably difficult in some cases and time-consuming in most. Not many (though increasingly more) autistic researchers are known to be autistic (and this might also change, may the field become less stigmatizing), so it might be difficult to always have an autistic researcher in each team. However, a more inclusive approach to science could obviate the need for an autistic researcher in each team: incorporating autistic perspectives even within a neurotypical-lead project could help the team change perspective, though it should be done right from the start, when research questions are individuated, in order to make sure they are both relevant to the autistic community and not inspired and/or operationalized from unconsciously ableist point of views. Participatory research is also always a possibility, and it would certainly help design more appropriate contents for our tasks and, potentially, shed light on alternative interpretations. Contrary to the mainstream opinion and attitude, in fact, autistic adults have in fact proven to be experts in their condition (Gillespie-Lynch et al., Reference Gillespie-Lynch, Kapp, Brooks, Pickens and Schwartzman2017).