Social Attribution to ‘Triangles Playing Tricks' Is Diminished and Improves Less with Age in Children with High Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders

Background: Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have shown deficits in Theory of Mind (ToM) skills, the ability to attribute thoughts and feelings to others.  Using the “Triangles Playing Tricks” task, which requires social attribution to relatively impoverished animations, previous studies showed that individuals with ASD provided fewer and less accurate mental state descriptions and ascribed less intentionality to ToM animations than did typically developing (TD) individuals (Abell et al., 2000; Campbell et al., 2006; Castelli, Frith, Happé, & Frith, 2002).  However, these studies have been limited to either low functioning children with ASD or high functioning adolescents/adults.  Thus, performance of high functioning children with ASD on this task remains an open question.  Further, age-related changes in these social attribution skills have not been explored in children with ASD.  

Objectives: The current study seeks to extend prior work by evaluating age-related changes in social attribution in high functioning children with ASD.  We hypothesize that children with ASD will receive lower appropriateness and intentionality ratings on the “Triangles Playing Tricks” animations than TD children.  In addition, we hypothesize that the relationship between age and performance on ToM animations will be greater among TD children than children with ASD.

Methods: Forty-one high functioning children with ASD (IQs>80) and 58 TD children between the ages of 6 and 17 (M=10.65; SD=2.36) participated in the study.  The groups did not differ in age, sex ratio, or full scale IQ.  Participants were asked to give descriptions of various animations of moving triangles in different conditions, including a goal-directed condition (e.g., the triangles interact in simple ways) and a ToM condition (e.g., one character appears to react to the other’s mental state).   

Results: In both the goal-directed and ToM conditions, children with ASD received lower intentionality and lower appropriateness scores than TD children (ps<.05).  This pattern of diagnostic group differences remained the same (ps<.05) in the ToM condition when examining younger (ages 6-10 years) and older (11+ years) groups of children separately, but only younger children with ASD exhibited impaired performance in the goal-directed condition (age groups were determined by a median split).  Adding verbal IQ as a covariate did not alter any of these findings.  A series of linear regressions revealed that in addition to group and age effects, a group by age interaction term also predicted appropriateness and intentionality scores in the ToM condition (ps<.05) with greater correlations between age and ToM performance in the TD group than the ASD group.  

Conclusions: Consistent with previous research, we show that among high functioning children with ASD, there was a reduced tendency to attribute social meaning to animations designed to elicit mentalizing.  Extending prior work, we find that while both groups showed age-related improvements in ToM performance, these correlations were greater among TD children than children with ASD.  This result suggests that with increasing age during childhood and early adolescence, individuals with ASD may fall further behind their typically developing peers in social attribution abilities.