Title: One step ahead: Prediction of other people's behavior in healthy and autistic individuals.
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: Humans are masters in predicting others' behavior. By watching the facial expression of our child, we know exactly which toy she will go for. When seeing someone frown at an open window, we are not surprised when she gets up and closes it. We make these predictions so readily and automatically, that athletes, magicians and pickpockets have developed elaborate feints to hide their true intentions from us. A breakdown of this predictive capacity might be one reason why social interactions are so confusing to those with autism or schizophrenia. Despite the importance of these predictions in social interactions, not much is known about how they come about, why we can make them with so little conscious effort and often without being aware of them. Our research aims to resolve these questions. We believe that there is a sophisticated mechanism in our brains that 'knows' which cues signal the intentions of others (e.g., looking at something signals interest, a smile signals the tendency to approach) and uses this knowledge to predict these people's actions. Importantly, we do not believe that the resulting predictions are abstract, but that they take the form of actual projections of the predicted movements through space (i.e. toward a desired object). Seeing somebody else longingly glance at a glass of water may therefore generate a projection of the course her reach will take towards it. Such concrete projections of others' future actions would be of immense benefit to social interactions. They would help you, for example, both to plan your own reach towards the glass if you wanted to snatch it away from her, but also allow you to preemptively steady the glass should you believe your hasty friend would knock it over. The present research has three aims The first aim is to demonstrate that such predictions of other's behavior are indeed generated when we watch others act. We will therefore test whether various social cues - where other people are looking, their emotional expression, what we know about their prior intentions - affect how their subsequent actions are represented, and whether their path through space is predicted. A second aim is to find out how these predictions come about. Recent research suggests that when we observe someone perform an action we perform it in our own mind at the same time. This allows people to use their own experiences to find out of how another's action will look and feel, and how it will unfold in the future. We will therefore test whether our own action knowledge contributes to the prediction of others' actions. A third and final aim is to establish whether such predictions are indeed crucial for social interactions. We will test a special population - those suffering from autism or related disorders - who find social interactions very challenging, often despite normal or even superior intelligence. These individuals might therefore be impaired in reading social cues and generating the predictions of others' actions that we can so readily rely on. We hope that our research will provide the first insights into the sophisticated predictive processes that help us navigate our social environment. It will link our understanding of others' behavior very closely to our understanding of our own actions in the world, providing a foundation for empathy and joint action without which human civilization would not be possible. Finally, it will highlight a cause of the social deficits in autism and create both a better understanding of these individuals, and may ultimately lead to the development of successful learning programs


Research activity codes: 2.3 PSYCHOLOGICAL, SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC FACTORS;1.2 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC PROCESSES
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH