Weird, Confusing AS Test re Large Smoothie

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btbnnyr
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07 Sep 2011, 5:03 pm

YellowBanana wrote:

Verdandi wrote:

The difference is that NTs are attributing thoughts to Joe that aren't stated in the question. Autistic people typically are not.

Absolutely.

The test says that Joe "stopped by the local smoothie shop to buy the largest size drink available."

Nowhere does it mention him planning to pay x$ for the smoothie - just that he was going to buy the smoothie.

So why introduce something that is not stated??? Why assume that the cost was important to Joe??

This is the source of uncountable numbers of NT-Autistic miscommunications.

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07 Sep 2011, 5:37 pm

YellowBanana wrote:

Verdandi wrote:

The difference is that NTs are attributing thoughts to Joe that aren't stated in the question. Autistic people typically are not.

Because that's how NTs think. When they hear "This person is doing that action" they extrapolate possible motives, thoughts, and intentions from those actions. These extrapolations are not always right (and in some cases can often be downright wrong) but it's how they interact, and how they expect everyone else to interact.

It's like the social attribution task - watch a film showing polygons interacting, and then describe what happened using as many social elements as possible - I've seen people tell these stories complete with characters and plot, and all I see are some polygons racing around. Or in the ADOS, looking at pictures (of frogs doing things) and telling a story based on what you see in the picture - this is much easier for NTs than it is for autistic people.

Or I guess it's all down to that theory of mind thing again. This doesn't make anyone's logic about Joe's actions wrong, since there is no correct answer (per the study's author). It may be that the author (Edouard Machery) found a way to test theory of mind in people who can emulate it with active cognition without trying to trip them up with too much information to hold in working memory. This may very well be superior to the Sally-Anne test.

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07 Sep 2011, 5:38 pm

btbnnyr wrote:

This is the source of uncountable numbers of NT-Autistic miscommunications.

It's definitely been the source of uncountable numbers of my miscommunications with NTs.

Tuttle
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07 Sep 2011, 5:43 pm

YellowBanana wrote:

Verdandi wrote:

The difference is that NTs are attributing thoughts to Joe that aren't stated in the question. Autistic people typically are not.

I was wondering, why assume he even knows what the old price was - there is no information saying that he's ever been to the store before.

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07 Sep 2011, 5:46 pm

Verdandi wrote:

YellowBanana wrote:

Verdandi wrote:

The difference is that NTs are attributing thoughts to Joe that aren't stated in the question. Autistic people typically are not.

Thank you. That does answer the big puzzle for me of why AS people were seeing "get largest smoothie" and NT people were seeing "spend X$ to get largest smoothie".

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07 Sep 2011, 5:53 pm

Tuttle wrote:

YellowBanana wrote:

Verdandi wrote:

The difference is that NTs are attributing thoughts to Joe that aren't stated in the question. Autistic people typically are not.

I was wondering, why assume he even knows what the old price was - there is no information saying that he's ever been to the store before.

As Verdandi notes- by extrapolation. It says in scenario 2, "Before ordering, the cashier told him that the mega-sized smoothies were now 1$ more than they used to be". So I ask myself, why would the cashier say that? I go to stores all the time and cashiers don't announce every price increase. The only time a cashier has ever announced a price increase to me was when I was a frequent customer, already familiar with certain prices. So I guess that a similar situation has happened in the scenario. This extrapolation is all based on cashiers not generally announcing price increases.

btbnnyr
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07 Sep 2011, 5:54 pm

My therapist actually asked me if it was horribly annoying that people, including her, were constantly and automatically reading between my lines to assign to me states of mind that I don't have. I answered that I had habituated to it during a lifetime of it and no longer become enraged when it happens, which, if one reads between the lines, means that it is indeed horribly annoying, minus the detectable visible hissing, unless one reads between the lines to detect the invisible hissing, which no one reads between the lines to detect if they need to ask about it. :lol:

I also said that I usually ask what people think I think, so I can correct any misreadings. She said that this was the basis of 80% of marriage counseling.

Last edited by btbnnyr on 07 Sep 2011, 5:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

marshall
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07 Sep 2011, 5:58 pm

YellowBanana wrote:

Verdandi wrote:

The difference is that NTs are attributing thoughts to Joe that aren't stated in the question. Autistic people typically are not.

Maybe because money is always seen as extremely important to most NTs. Therefore the exchange of the extra dollar for a large smoothie must take a great deal of conscious deliberation and positive intent. Rather than it just being a minor nuisance that barely requires consideration if you're that thirsty.

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07 Sep 2011, 6:01 pm

Janissy wrote:

Thank you. That does answer the big puzzle for me of why AS people were seeing "get largest smoothie" and NT people were seeing "spend X$ to get largest smoothie".

Now here's a thought: It's not theory of mind at all. It's explicit knowledge/awareness/perception vs. implicit knowledge/awareness/perception.

Maybe it impacts how autistic people perceive and interact with others because a lot of social interactions and states of mind are often implicit. It's like, I may not be able to tell that you are upset, but if you let me know I can be sympathetic. But it extends into things that have little or nothing to do with interacting with people or "theory of mind," at least it does for me.

That is, somewhere on this forum I wrote a post about how I need to be able to draw explicit connections between things to collate them into a larger coherent thing (I hope that made sense). Like I can learn how to do the same thing in three different contexts and not generalize any of those three without explicitly drawing a connection. My favorite example is how I learned to drive a tractor built from a car's spare parts. The tractor used manual transmission, so I learned manual, right? But when my cousin was teaching me to drive in his car with a manual transmission, I didn't even think about what I already knew because it wasn't a tractor, wasn't on my grandparents' farm, and thus it was totally different, and I couldn't learn how to drive manual. It took me years to explicitly connect these two things.

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07 Sep 2011, 6:23 pm

Verdandi wrote:

Janissy wrote:

Thank you. That does answer the big puzzle for me of why AS people were seeing "get largest smoothie" and NT people were seeing "spend X$ to get largest smoothie".

Now here's a thought: It's not theory of mind at all. It's explicit knowledge/awareness/perception vs. implicit knowledge/awareness/perception.

I think it's tied with the autistic tendency to "over-complicate things" instead of "using common sense". We don't subconsciously pick up on certain unstated contextual patterns/meanings in language that may be cultural in origin. Some phrases are just accepted to have a very specific meaning whereas the literal meaning derived directly from the words and their grammatical construction is ambiguous. People seem to just remember and accept certain implied meanings that occur in very specific contexts without giving them any conscious thought.

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07 Sep 2011, 6:32 pm

marshall wrote:

Overcomplicate? The "unintentional/unintentional" logic for the smoothie is less complicated than the "unintentional/intentional" logic, as the latter requires adding information to the equation whereas the former simply uses the available information.

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07 Sep 2011, 6:45 pm

Verdandi wrote:

marshall wrote:

I'm just explaining how an NT sees things. That's why I used quotes.

In general, for an NT, logic is only invoked after the correct answer has already been arrived at through some subconscious process/rule. Logic explains the answer after the fact. It doesn't produce the answer. That's why the knee-jerk answer arrived at subconsciously is just assumed to be "obviously correct" while other answers must be the result of "over-analysis" or "overcomplication".

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07 Sep 2011, 6:54 pm

marshall wrote:

Okay, thank you for the explanation. That does make sense.

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07 Sep 2011, 8:43 pm

marshall wrote:

zen_mistress wrote:

That is an interesting idea. For me, I came to the same conlusion as an NT, through the following process: I dont know whether this is an Aspergian process or not.

1) Picture myself as Joe, standing at the counter, ordering the drinks
2) With the second situation, I am told about the extra dollar. I consider the cost. Then decide to accept. Have made the decision. Then with the decision made, I act on the intent generated by making the decision. So I act intentionally. The events that occur generate intent as they happen.

I wonder if my brain just moves very slowly. If in real life I was standing at the counter I would have frozen up a bit with the introduction of the new dollar. So this in itself would cause an anxiety-producing situation which would warrant a whole new need for decision making and altering of intent.

It is all very complex anyway.

If the question was worded "When Joe paid the extra dollar, did he act intentionally?" I would have come to the same conclusion as you. The thing is I don't automatically connect the word "intent" with an action. I see things more abstractly, keeping mental states/dispositions/plans and actions temporally separate. Maybe it is an NT tendency to see "intent" as a temporally fluid characteristic rather than something that must be relative to some time frame of reference in which a plan was conceived. Of course NTs use the word both ways - i.e. in some cases it is fluid and connected directly with action, in others its about to conforming to a preconceived "plan" from a earlier fixed frame of reference. I don't see what contextual clue would lead to one interpretation vs. another in this particular story though.

I think I might have figured it out.

I read in all the information quickly as a chunk and then stop and put it all together, "rewinding" in my head to process what's going on in the mind of a particular character. If the story is simple and short like this one, then the entire thing will be one "chunk" in my head. That's why I'm more likely to interpret "intent" in the story in a global way, i.e. as conforming to a plan, rather than strictly following along with the character as I read. I also think this is the reason I can't follow along with audio books.

Us 3 here at home answered the two: "unintentional." And that ^ is how the meaning appeared to us.

As far as I know we all are non-spectrum, but we do lack the proverbial "common sense," probably due to our inattentive nature.

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08 Sep 2011, 7:16 am

marshall wrote:

YellowBanana wrote:

Verdandi wrote:

The difference is that NTs are attributing thoughts to Joe that aren't stated in the question. Autistic people typically are not.

I don't think cost or money has any more importance among NTs than within the ASD population. It's an individual preference. Many autistics are on tight budget so it wouldn't be rational for them to spend money without much consideration. Some, like the kid in the parallel NT thread, wouldn't mind giving out one dollar more, while others, incl. me, would care even more than a typical NT, since money is another thing we can be obsessed with. In other words, I had to put aside my strong preference for money while I was interpreting the examples and answering the question. I suppose anybody with basic perspective taking abilities is able to do that.

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08 Sep 2011, 8:01 am

Have you read the relating paper yet?

The Concept of Intentional Action in Asperger Syndrome / Tiziana Zalla & Edouard Machery

Basically, it argues that people with ASD has limited ability to recognize "purely instrumental desires" as a means to achieve "ultimate desires".

"To determine whether getting a free cup and paying an extra-dollar are intentional, participants (the ascribers) typically construct at least three consecutive representations of the events described in the vignettes: (i) a causal representation; (ii) a valence-based representation; and (iii) a mentalistic representation. " (page 5.)

(page 8., bolding from me)

Quote:

(...) An event is judged to be intentional only if it is the object of a desire. This analysis suggests that judging the intentional status of events that are concomitant with an intended action (e.g., the event of paying an extra-dollar that is concomitant with the action consisting of buying an extra-large smoothie) involves understanding the structure of the whole action. This is a complex process that involves understanding what the agent values and ascribing instrumental and ultimate desires to her.

(pages 23-24., bolding from me)

Quote:

On the basis of this account, we expected that people with Asperger Syndrome might have difficulties with judging that a neutral or negatively valued concomitant event is intentional because it involves understanding that an agent can instrumentally desire something she does not value or that she disvalues. As expected, we found that the judgments about the intentionality of morally neutral actions, such as paying an extra-euro to get a smoothie, made by a group of individuals with Asperger Syndrome differed from those made by a group of people with typical development: Individuals with Asperger Syndrome had difficulties appreciating the intentional nature of those actions that are desired merely in order to fulfil an ultimate goal. It has been suggested that people with autism spectrum disorders have difficulties understanding beliefs as a cause of emotion (Baron-Cohen, 1991) or integrating information about beliefs and desires with emotional understanding (Shamay-Tsoory, Tomer, Yaniv, & Aharon-Peretz, 2002). Here, we suggest that understanding the intentional structure of an action implies the ability to assign instrumental desires which are cognitively derived by attributing a belief about what will lead to the fulfilment of the ultimate desire. People with Asperger Syndrome’s understanding of the structure of some complex actions— especially those that involve negatively valued means—is thus impaired in at least some contexts. Such a difficulty in conceiving an action as an object of a purely instrumental desire might arise from a specific deficit in mindreading. Alternatively, it could arise from an impaired capacity to inhibit the tendency to represent positively (desirable) valued actions as intentional and negatively (non desirable) valued actions as non-intentional. Indeed, an extensive literature has shown that the ability to disengage from a prepotent representation is impaired in people with autism spectrum disorders (Hill, 2004; Ozonoff et al., 1991a, b).

(pages 16-17., bolding from me)

Quote:

Previous research indicates that individuals with autism spectrum disorders fail on tests of planning, such as the Tower of Hanoi task (Ozonoff, Pennington & Rogers, 1991a, b) and the Tower of London task (Hughes, Russell & Robbins, 1994), which tests for the ability to establish means-end relationships. By using a picture-sequencing task, Zalla and colleagues (2006) investigated the ability of a group of children with autism to represent different types of goal-directed actions. Participants were told that they would be presented with series of pictures representing actions and events, and that they would have to arrange them in their correct temporal/causal order so as to create a story. The number of errors (i.e., event inversions) was greater in the middle of the sequences, suggesting that while children with autism were able to identify the ultimate goal of the action sequence, they had difficulties understanding how some component events were related to bringing about the ultimate goal of the agent. Indeed, several participants with autism placed easily the first and last images in their correct order, but encountered difficulties in inserting the cards in the middle of the sequence. The authors suggested that these difficulties might be linked to difficulties in representing the hierarchical structure of the intentional action.

Furthermore, difficulties in distinguishing between intentional and non-intentional actions in others and themselves have already been reported in individuals with autism spectrum disorders. In Philips, Baron-Cohen, and Rutter (1998), young participants with autism showed more difficulties in distinguishing the unintended from the intended outcomes of their own actions than a comparison group, when the unintended actions were positively valued.

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