Expression of Autistic Traits and Attention to Social and Perceptual Context in South Asia: Culture Meets Biology

Background: Individual differences in perception and in social cognition are products of both biology and cultural experience. Many of the same differences that typify autism when they occur in extremes also underlie normal human cognitive variation when they occur to more subtle degrees. In particular, autism spectrum conditions are characterised by low degrees of two linked capacities: level of construal, meaning the tendency to represent percepts iconically as individual details rather than symbolically as whole contexts, and psychological distance, meaning the tendencies to perceive objects and events in distant rather than peri-personal space, to recall or to anticipate past or future time rather than the here-and-now, to approach social interactions in the allocentric frame of other people rather than one's own egocentric frame, and to represent hypothetical, counterfactual, or fictional beliefs that are at odds with actual facts. Significantly, culture also exerts linked effects on level of construal and psychological distance, which are relatively increased in more contextual, socially focused cultures and decreased in more individualistic, self-focused cultures. This effect may constitute an implicit behavioural intervention that would shift cognitive traits throughout the entire population distribution away from the autism spectrum. The result might be most evident in the social competence of individuals at the boundary of that spectrum, namely, in Asperger syndrome and in first-degree relatives who may share autistic cognitive traits.

Objectives: This model predicts (1) an increase in perceived social communicative competence in Indians versus Americans; (2) a sex difference, with this effect stronger in males than females, and (3) a heightening of the tendency in the subpopulation of males with low empathising to “systemise empathy,” that is, to manifest correlation between measures of detail-oriented perceptual traits and measures of social communicative competence.

Methods: Families were identified through special schools in Kolkata. Because individuals with mild Asperger syndrome or otherwise low levels of autistic traits generally are not brought to clinical attention in India (instead, they tend to be scaffolded and supported within the family and the community), the strategy was to ascertain families via the more severely affected probands but then to test their non-clinical siblings. Experimental behavioural and psychometric tests included Embedded Figures, go/no-go, psychophysical motion coherence threshold, Posner visual spatial attention shifting, the Social Responsiveness Scale, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, the Attachment Style Questionnaire, and the Bengali Autism Spectrum Quotient. Most testing was conducted in English, though some tests were augmented with Bengali translations of problematic words or phrases.

Results: Comparisons of Indian results with an existing American data set suggest an increase in social competence and secure attachment in the Indian siblings, along with a decrease in perceptual disembedding and in the Posner validity effect. Sex differences are in process of being evaluated.

Conclusions: The more prescribed and scripted, even algorithmic nature of family and social relations in South Asia may support and scaffold social interaction in low empathisers. Behavioural interventions worldwide can be informed by cross-cultural practices.