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Theses

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Social interactions form an important part of our daily lives and they often seem natural to us. For example, when meeting with friends, you often talk about situations that have happened, problems you might have or feelings you might cherish. During these interactions, it is important to understand how your friends are feeling and to correctly infer their intentions. However, a certain proportion of the population has Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and has difficulties with understanding and interpreting these “obvious” interactions. Such persistent deficits in reciprocal social communication and interaction constitutes one of the main symptoms of ASD. A lot of research has therefore been devoted to investigate behavioural differences in terms of social inferences in individuals with and without ASD. In this thesis, we have investigated to what extent adolescents with and without ASD make implicit social inferences by using a chase detection paradigm similar to the one used by Gao and colleagues in previous research (2009). In our chasing task, participants judged the absence or presence of a chase within a display of four seemingly randomly moving dots. While two of these dots always moved randomly, the other two could fulfil the role of being either the chasing (the wolf) or the chased dot (the sheep). Three conditions were implemented to investigate possible behavioural differences between adolescents with and without ASD. In the baseline condition, we only manipulated the chasing subtlety, i.e. the amount of noise added to the path that the wolf follows when chasing the sheep. In the social condition, we implemented a social cue to these baseline dots by adding red eyes. We expect the ASD group to perform worse than the Typically Developing (TD) group in both the baseline and social condition. Finally, the contrast of the dots (non-social cue) was manipulated periodically in the frequency condition, in which we expect the ASD group to perform as good as the TD group. Our results replicated the previous findings of Gao and colleagues (2009) in TD participants, and confirm that chasing subtlety is an important predictor for perceiving animacy. Furthermore, adding social information improved chase detection performance in both participants with and without ASD. Non-social information however did not have a significant effect on the performance. In addition, the performance of adolescents with ASD was less dependent on chasing subtlety than that of TD participants. Our findings suggest that chase detection, and hence animacy perception, was intact in adolescents with ASD, but depended less on chasing subtlety compared to the TD participants. A possible explanation can be found in literature investigating visual search performance in individuals with and without ASD.