Autism, Uncertainty Monitoring and Mindreading

There is an important question which states the association among metacognition and mindreading (theory of mind). Nicholson, Williams, Grainger, Lind, and Carruthers (2019) investigated implicit non-verbal as well as explicit verbal uncertainty monitoring in autism and healthy control uncertainty. The study of Nichols et al. (2019) studied a classic judgment of confidence task, the opt out version of the uncertainty monitoring task in patients with autism and healthy control subjects. In such a kind of judgment of confidence task the subjects have to make a perceptual or cognitive discrimination and have to say if their judgment was correct. The first question of the study was whether metacognition is not deficient in autism. The second aim of the study was if the meta-representation of the self was related to the meta-representation of other persons, as assessed with the mindreading task.

It was found that patients with autism had impairments that were related to meta-representation of the self and that of others (Nichols et al., 2019). Metacognition was thus impaired in autism subjects. It is argued that deficient metacognition is might be the result of metarepresentational resources that are shared by metacognition as well as by mindreading (Nichols et al., 2019).