Abstract
People with Autistic Spectrum Condition (ASC) are known to be deficient in visualizing the intent of others, especially in “Theory of Mind” tasks involving displays of animated geometric shapes. Research shows they will use fewer words of intent to describe animacy displays than neuro-typicals. Here we examine the ability of people with ASC to determine intention using a technique previously developed and reported by the authors (McAleer et al, VSS 2005). This technique allows us to study intention recognition using either the original video displays of actors or the corresponding animacy displays. In this study, we employ a six alternative forced choice intention recognition task to compare ASC and neuro-typical adult participants, looking specifically at the six intentions of chasing, fighting, flirting, following, guarding and playing. Each intention was shown as a video recorded display and as an animacy display, from the two perspectives of overhead and side-on. Preliminary results reveal an overall difference in ability to recognise intentions between the groups, with the ASC group performing lower than the neuro-typicals in both the video and animacy displays. Furthermore, there was a consistent pattern of results for the neuro-typical group showing that intention recognition improves when viewing video displays and viewing actions from the overhead perspective. However, a different pattern of results was obtained for the ASC group, suggesting that the ASC group had difficulty in discriminating intentions in the video displays shown from the overhead perspective.