Judging intentionality in the context of ambiguous actions among autistic adults

Discerning intentional from unintentional actions is a key aspect of social cognition. Mental state attribution tasks show that autistic people are less accurate than neurotypicals in attributing an agent’s intention when there is clearly a right answer. Little is known about how autistic people judge the intentionality of ambiguous actions (i.e., actions that are neither clearly intentional nor clearly unintentional). This study sought to find out whether autistic individuals differ in their interpretation of ambiguous action compared to neurotypical controls. 20 autistic and 20 neurotypical adults completed an ambiguous action and theory of mind task. Autistic traits, verbal reasoning and non-verbal perceptual reasoning ability were measured. Results show that intentionality endorsement scores for ambiguous but prototypically accidental actions were higher in autistic participants than controls. Theory of Mind (ToM) scores did not correlate with intentionality endorsement scores in either group therefore group differences could not be explained by ToM ability. Autistic participants had a tendency to over-attribute intention compared to neurotypicals, which could not be explained by ToM ability. Studying ambiguous action is important with respect to ecological validity, given that we often face ambiguous actions during social encounters. •Little is known about how autistic people process ambiguous actions.•Autistic participants tended to judge ambiguous actions to be intentional.•Group differences could not be explained by theory of mind ability.