Altered adaptive mentalization in autistic adults
Abstract
Autism has long been linked to difficulties in understanding others’ mental states. However, what specific neuro-cognitive mechanisms underlie these mentalization difficulties remains poorly understood. Here, we show that a key determinant of behavioral difficulties is reduced adaptation to others’ idiosyncratic ways of reasoning. We demonstrate this with computational modelling and functional magnetic resonance imaging in 89 adults (43 autistic and 46 neurotypical) who played repeated interactive games, following a pre-registered analysis plan. As predicted, we found reduced behavioral performance in autistic participants, which our model attributed to a decreased ability to adapt to others’ changing behavioral strategies. Neurally, the autistic group showed no consistent regional activation differences but reduced and less precise expression of a previously identified multivariate signature of adaptive mentalization, suggesting distributed rather than localized functional changes in the neural systems supporting dynamic social reasoning. Our approach provides a mechanistic account of mentalizing difficulties in autism and may aid in its assessment and diagnosis.
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BibTeX
@misc{buergi2026altered,
title = {{Altered adaptive mentalization in autistic adults}},
author = {Niklas Buergi and Arkady Konovalov and Caroline Biegel and Tania Villar de Araujo and Gökhan Aydogan and Christian Ruff},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/279cw_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/279cw_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Altered adaptive mentalization in autistic adults
AU - Niklas Buergi
AU - Arkady Konovalov
AU - Caroline Biegel
AU - Tania Villar de Araujo
AU - Gökhan Aydogan
AU - Christian Ruff
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/04
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/279cw_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/279cw_v1/
AB - Autism has long been linked to difficulties in understanding others’ mental states. However, what specific neuro-cognitive mechanisms underlie these mentalization difficulties remains poorly understood. Here, we show that a key determinant of behavioral difficulties is reduced adaptation to others’ idiosyncratic ways of reasoning. We demonstrate this with computational modelling and functional magnetic resonance imaging in 89 adults (43 autistic and 46 neurotypical) who played repeated interactive games, following a pre-registered analysis plan. As predicted, we found reduced behavioral performance in autistic participants, which our model attributed to a decreased ability to adapt to others’ changing behavioral strategies. Neurally, the autistic group showed no consistent regional activation differences but reduced and less precise expression of a previously identified multivariate signature of adaptive mentalization, suggesting distributed rather than localized functional changes in the neural systems supporting dynamic social reasoning. Our approach provides a mechanistic account of mentalizing difficulties in autism and may aid in its assessment and diagnosis.
ER -