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NEU ROSC I EN C E | O P I N I O N

Autism and the Social Mind

Social-cognitive neuroscience offers insights into the early course of brain development and its
connections to autism spectrum disorder

By Peter Mundy on May 15, 2021

Credit: Jesper Klausen Getty Images

Since the modern era of research on autism began in the 1980s, questions about social
cognition and social brain development have been of central interest to researchers. This year
marks the 20th anniversary of the first annual meeting of the International Society for
Autism Research (INSAR), and it is evident in this year’s meeting that the growth of social-
cognitive neuroscience over the past two decades has significantly enriched autism science.
For those unfamiliar with the term, social-cognitive neuroscience is the study of the brain
systems that are involved in the causes and effects of social behaviors and social interaction.
Some of these involve brain systems involved in thinking about other people’s thoughts or
intentions, empathizing, social motivation and the impact of social attention on an
individual’s thinking and emotions.

At the same time, research with and for autistic people has also enriched social-cognitive
neuroscience and the understanding of how our social minds develop. Autism spectrum
disorder (ASD) is a complex and heterogeneous part of the human condition, or
neurodiversity. It is associated with a wide range of life outcomes, from “disorder” or the
profound challenges that encumber about 30 percent of affected individuals with minimal
language and intellectual disability, to “differences” among people who have well-above-
average abilities and accomplishments.

Regardless of their outcomes, though, people on the autism spectrum travel a different path
of social-cognitive neurodevelopment that appears to begin in infancy. For example, many
experience some level of difficulty with social-cognitive mentalizing, also known as “theory of
mind”—the mental representation of other people’s thoughts, perspectives, beliefs, intentions
or emotions, which enables us to understand or predict their behaviors.

Social-cognitive neuroscience tells us that brain systems of the medial frontal cortex,
temporal cortex and parietal cortex, as well as reward centers of the brain, enable
mentalizing. Accordingly, differences in the development and/or transmissions of
information across this distributed social-cognitive brain network may contribute to
differences in mentalizing among autistic people. These differences can lead to a range of
outcomes, from problems in the capacity to mentalize to alterations in the spontaneous use of
mentalizing, or the motivation and effort involved in mentalizing during social interactions.

These observations are informative, but do not address fundamental questions about how
social-cognitive brain systems develop or why their development might be different for
autistic people. These questions are essential in autism science because understanding the
early course of social-cognitive neurodevelopment may afford the best opportunity to
mitigate the profoundly negative effects that social-cognitive differences can have on some
autistic people. Serendipitously, this motivation to understand the very early development of
our social brain can inform the broader understanding of social-cognitive neuroscience and
human nature. As it turns out, one key to understanding the development of our social brains
may come from observations of social attention in infancy.

As early as six to 12 months of age, some infants who go on to receive an autism diagnosis
already display differences in the development of social attention. They look less frequently at
the face and eyes of people than other infants and are less likely to coordinate their attention
with another person to adopt a common point of view or reference, or “joint attention.”
Infants with neurotypical development follow the gaze direction or gesture of other people or
lead the gaze of other people to establish joint attention and share information through a
common perceptual perspective.

Developing the ability to coordinate attention socially is important in and of itself. For
example, every teacher’s admonition to students to “pay attention!” is really a request to “pay
attention to what I [the teacher] am attending to.” Joint attention is vital to social
competence at all ages. Adolescents and adults who cannot follow, initiate or join with the
rapid-fire changes of shared attention in social interactions may be impaired in their capacity
for relatedness and relationships.

Equally important, joint attention is also an early building block of social-cognitive

mentalizing. Every time infants coordinate attention socially with other people, they practice
perceptual perspective-taking. They do this hundreds if not thousands of times in early
development; it tunes aspects of social-brain development that subsequently support the
capacity for mental perspective-taking. Mental perspective-taking is synonymous with
mentalizing and our ability to understand the thoughts, beliefs, and intentions of other
people. Indeed, several studies provide evidence of a significant overlap in brain systems
involved in joint attention and social-cognitive mentalizing.

Accordingly, differences in early social attention are thought to contribute to differences in

the neurodevelopment of social-cognitive mentalizing in some to many people with autism.
Research also suggests that differences in systems that regulate the motivation for social
attention might play a role in this aspect of the development of autism, though the nature of
this motivation is not understood. One possibility is that decreased motivation to attend to
faces may lead to critical early difference in social attention.

Alternatively, differences in the “eye-contact effect” may impact social attention

development. The eye-contact effect is a phenomenon in which awareness of being the object
of others’ attention triggers an arousal response that enhances stimulus salience and
information processing during social attention coordination. When we are aware of other
people looking at us, changes occur in our mental processes that can benefit social learning.
Several studies now suggest that people with autism may be less responsive to, or less aware
of, being the object of attention of others.

Hence, autism science raises the hypothesis that the first step toward human social
neurocognitive development may involve months of practice with social attention
coordination with caregivers during infancy. Moreover, our response to eye contact of other
people may provide an early motivational stance that prioritizes infant social attention
development and the development of our social brains. Notably, recent studies indicate that
imitating the behavior of young children with autism, which likely affects a child’s awareness
that another person is looking at them, can improve joint attention and language
development.

Of course, the most fundamental lesson we can draw from all these observations about the
development of our social mind is that we are all more similar than different, regardless of
our paths of neurodevelopment, and that autistic people have much to teach us about the
nature of human nature.

This is an opinion and analysis article.

Further reading:

Baron-Cohen, S. (2019). The concept of neurodiversity is dividing the autism community.

Scientific American.

Chevallier, C., Kohls, G., Troiani, V., Brodkin, E. S., & Schultz, R. T. (2012). The social
motivation theory of autism. Trends in cognitive sciences, 16(4), 231-239.

Gulsrud, A. C., Hellemann, G., Shire, S., & Kasari, C. (2016). Isolating active ingredients in a
parent‐mediated social communication intervention for toddlers with autism spectrum
disorder. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 57(5), 606-613.

Grynszpan, O., Bouteiller, J., Grynszpan, S., Le Barillier, F., Martin, J. C., & Nadel, J. (2019).
Altered sense of gaze leading in autism. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 67, 101441.

Mundy, P. (2018). A review of joint attention and social‐cognitive brain systems in typical
development and autism spectrum disorder. European Journal of Neuroscience, 47(6), 497-
514.

Reddy, V. (2003). On being the object of attention: implications for self–other

consciousness. Trends in cognitive sciences, 7(9), 397-402.

Senju, A., & Johnson, M. H. (2009). The eye contact effect: mechanisms and
development. Trends in cognitive sciences, 13(3), 127-134.

Stephenson, L., Edwards, S. G., & Bayliss, A. (2020). From gaze perception to social
cognition: A neurocognitive model of joint and shared attention. Perspectives on
Psychological Science. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1745691620953773
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Peter Mundy, Ph.D., is the president of the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR) and professor and Lisa
Capps Endowed Chair of neurodevelopmental disorders and education in the School of Education and the Department
of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis). He is also director of educational
research at the UC Davis MIND Institute.

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them
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