Evidence of spontaneous mentalizing in children with Cornelia de Lange and fragile X syndromes, but not autistic children

TL;DR

Children with Cornelia de Lange and fragile X syndromes show implicit mentalizing abilities similar to neurotypical children, but autistic children do not, suggesting traditional tests may not capture true mentalizing in these groups.

Contribution

The study introduces an implicit mentalizing task to reveal mentalizing abilities in children with genetic syndromes and autism, bypassing language barriers.

Findings

Neurotypical children outperformed others in explicit mentalizing tasks.

Children with CdLS, FXS, and neurotypical children showed better implicit mentalizing than autistic children.

Implicit mentalizing performance was not linked to age or language ability in any group.

Abstract

It has been suggested that mentalizing abilities underlie the distinct profiles of autism characteristics observed between Cornelia de Lange (CdLS) and fragile X syndromes (FXS) and autistic people without a genetic syndrome. However, traditional explicit mentalizing tasks have high language demands that may mask true mentalizing abilities in these populations. We compared performance on traditional explicit tasks and an implicit anticipatory looking mentalizing task in children with CdLS (N = 9), boys with FXS (N = 9), autistic (N = 22) and neurotypical (N = 34) children. The groups showed divergent patterns of performance. Neurotypical children had higher explicit mentalizing scores than all other groups. However, neurotypical, FXS and CdLS groups showed better implicit mentalizing performance than autistic children. Both chronological age and receptive language ability correlated with explicit mentalizing scores in neurotypical children. In autistic children, there was an association between explicit mentalizing score and receptive language ability but not chronological age. Explicit mentalizing score was not associated with receptive language ability or chronological age in the CdLS and FXS groups. Neither chronological age nor receptive language ability correlated with implicit mentalizing task performance in any group. Findings suggest that explicit tasks may mask true mentalizing abilities in autistic children, children with CdLS and children with FXS.

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