Perceived Neurotype of the Other May Affect Self/Other-Representation in Autistic People.

Abstract

Recent work suggests that the ‘social deficits’ historically ascribed to autism may be the product of cross-neurotype sociocommunicative differences between autistic people and the neurotypical majority. Where previous work has explored impacts of neurotype mismatches on more complex social behaviour, we aimed to explore how perception of another person's neurotype affects unconscious, implicit processes of self/other-representation that underpin higher-order sociocognitive processes. Autistic (n = 149) and non-autistic (n = 166) participants completed a perceptual matching task where they affirmed or negated learned associations between geometric shapes and three person-labels (themselves, a named friend, and a stranger). The majority of autistic participants perceived their friends and strangers as neurotypical, and the usual preferential processing of friends over strangers was reduced in this group. Effects of other neurotypes were evident in slightly lower accuracy when processing information about people with a different neurodivergent/neurotypical status to participants. The real-life relevance of cognitive biases was indicated by an indirect relationship of greater self-bias to more intense past-year suicide ideation via the mediator of lower autistic community connectedness. Being a neurominority affects implicit processing of socially-relevant information as well as explicit social processes, and these differences may be quantified by a simple cognitive measure linked to complex social behaviour.