References
-
Adolphs, R. The social brain: neural basis of social knowledge. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 60, 693–716 (2009).
-
Behrens, T., Hunt, L., Woolrich, M. & Rushworth, M. Associative learning of social value. Nature 456, 245–249 (2008).
-
Gweon, H. Inferential social learning: cognitive foundations of human social learning and teaching. Trends Cogn. Sci. 25, 896–910 (2021).
-
Frolichs, K. M. M., Rosenblau, G. & Korn, C. W. Incorporating social knowledge structures into computational models. Nat. Commun. 13, 6205 (2022).
-
Rosenblau, G., Frolichs, K. & Korn, C. W. A neuro-computational social learning framework to facilitate transdiagnostic classification and treatment across psychiatric disorders. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 149, 105181 (2023).
-
Ruff, C. C. & Fehr, E. The neurobiology of rewards and values in social decision making. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 15, 549–562 (2014).
-
Zhou, Y., Han, S., Kang, P., Tobler, P. N. & Hein, G. The social transmission of empathy relies on observational reinforcement learning. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 121, e2313073121 (2024).
-
Fareri, D. S., Chang, L. J. & Delgado, M. R. Computational substrates of social value in interpersonal collaboration. J. Neurosci. 35, 8170–8180 (2015).
-
Towner, E., Chierchia, G. & Blakemore, S.-J. Sensitivity and specificity in affective and social learning in adolescence. Trends Cogn. Sci. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2023.04.002 (2023).
-
Ezaki, T., Horita, Y., Takezawa, M. & Masuda, N. Reinforcement learning explains conditional cooperation and its moody cousin. PLoS Comput. Biol. 12, e1005034 (2016).
-
Tomasello, M. & Vaish, A. Origins of human cooperation and morality. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 64, 231–255 (2013).
-
Castelli, F., Frith, C., Happe, F. & Frith, U. Autism, Asperger syndrome and brain mechanisms for the attribution of mental states to animated shapes. Brain 125, 1839–1849 (2002).
-
Rosenblau, G., Kliemann, D., Heekeren, H. R. & Dziobek, I. Approximating implicit and explicit mentalizing with two naturalistic video-based tasks in typical development and autism spectrum disorder. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 45, 953–965 (2015).
-
Senju, A., Southgate, V., White, S. & Frith, U. Mindblind eyes: an absence of spontaneous theory of mind in Asperger syndrome. Science 325, 883–885 (2009).
-
Schneider, D., Slaughter, V. P., Bayliss, A. P. & Dux, P. E. A temporally sustained implicit theory of mind deficit in autism spectrum disorders. Cognition 129, 410–417 (2013).
-
Frith, U. Autism and theory of mind in everyday life. Soc. Dev. 3, 108–124 (1994).
-
Bertollo, J. R. et al. Adaptive behavior in youth with autism spectrum disorder: the role of flexibility. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 50, 42–50 (2020).
-
Biggs, E. E. & Carter, E. W. Quality of life for transition-age youth with autism or intellectual disability. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 46, 190–204 (2016).
-
Wallace, G. L. et al. Divergence of age-related differences in social-communication: improvements for typically developing youth but declines for youth with autism spectrum disorder. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 47, 472–479 (2017).
-
Charpentier, C. et al. P150. Computational Characterization of Social Inference Deficits Associated With Autism Traits During Observational Learning. Biol. Psychiatry 91, S147 (2022).
-
Wu, Q. et al. Individual differences in autism-like traits are associated with reduced goal emulation in a computational model of observational learning. Nat. Ment. Health 2, 1032–1044 (2024).
-
Zaki, J., Kallman, S., Wimmer, G. E., Ochsner, K. & Shohamy, D. Social cognition as reinforcement learning: feedback modulates emotion inference. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 28, 1270–1282 (2016).
-
Rosenblau, G., Korn, C. W., Dutton, A., Lee, D. & Pelphrey, K. A. Neurocognitive mechanisms of social inferences in typical and autistic adolescents. Biol. Psychiatry Cogn. Neurosci. Neuroimaging 6, 782–791 (2021).
-
Spackman, E. et al. Characterising insistence on sameness and circumscribed interests: a qualitative study of parent perspectives. J. Autism Dev. Disord. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-024-06404-4 (2024).
-
Turner-Brown, L. M., Lam, K. S. L., Holtzclaw, T. N., Dichter, G. S. & Bodfish, J. W. Phenomenology and measurement of circumscribed interests in autism spectrum disorders. Autism 15, 437–456 (2011).
-
Marí-Bauset, S., Zazpe, I., Mari-Sanchis, A., Llopis-González, A. & Morales-Suárez-Varela, M. Food selectivity in autism spectrum disorders: a systematic review. J. Child Neurol. 29, 1554–1561 (2014).
-
Byrska, A. et al. Patterns of food selectivity among children with autism spectrum disorder. J. Clin. Med. 12, 5469 (2023).
-
Milton, D. E. M. On the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem’. Disabil. Soc. 27, 883–887 (2012).
-
Livingston, L. A., Hargitai, L. D. & Shah, P. The double empathy problem: a derivation chain analysis and cautionary note. Psychol. Rev. 132, 744–757 (2025).
-
Hasson, U., Ghazanfar, A. A., Galantucci, B., Garrod, S. & Keysers, C. Brain-to-brain coupling: a mechanism for creating and sharing a social world. Trends Cogn. Sci. 16, 114–121 (2012).
-
Redcay, E. & Schilbach, L. Using second-person neuroscience to elucidate the mechanisms of social interaction. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 20, 495–505 (2019).
-
Bolis, D., Balsters, J., Wenderoth, N., Becchio, C. & Schilbach, L. Beyond autism: introducing the dialectical misattunement hypothesis and a Bayesian account of intersubjectivity. Psychopathology 50, 355–372 (2017).
-
McNaughton, K. A., Dziura, S., Lemay, E. P., Yarger, H. A. & Redcay, E. Neural similarity and interaction success in autistic and non-autistic adolescents. Sci. Rep. 15, 7996 (2025).
-
Crompton, C. J., Ropar, D., Evans-Williams, C. V., Flynn, E. G. & Fletcher-Watson, S. Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective. Autism Int. J. Res. Pract. 24, 1704–1712 (2020).
-
Bolis, D., Lahnakoski, J. M., Seidel, D., Tamm, J. & Schilbach, L. Interpersonal similarity of autistic traits predicts friendship quality. Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci. 16, 222–231 (2021).
-
Cahalan, S., Mitroff, S. R., Subiaul, F. & Rosenblau, G. Using the cognitive rigidity-flexibility dimension to deepen our understanding of the autism spectrum. Personal. Neurosci. 8, e3 (2025).
-
Liu, W., Pluta, A., Charpentier, C. J. & Rosenblau, G. A computational cognitive neuroscience approach for characterizing individual differences in autism: introduction to special issue. Personal. Neurosci. 8, e2 (2025).
-
Rødgaard, E.-M., Jensen, K., Vergnes, J.-N., Soulières, I. & Mottron, L. Temporal changes in effect sizes of studies comparing individuals with and without autism: a meta-analysis. JAMA Psychiatry 76, 1124–1132 (2019).
-
Agelink Van Rentergem, J. A., Deserno, M. K. & Geurts, H. M. Validation strategies for subtypes in psychiatry: a systematic review of research on autism spectrum disorder. Clin. Psychol. Rev. 87, 102033 (2021).
-
Lombardo, M. V., Lai, M.-C. & Baron-Cohen, S. Big data approaches to decomposing heterogeneity across the autism spectrum. Mol. Psychiatry 24, 1435–1450 (2019).
-
Sevgi, M., Diaconescu, A. O., Henco, L., Tittgemeyer, M. & Schilbach, L. Social Bayes: using Bayesian modeling to study autistic trait-related differences in social cognition. Biol. Psychiatry 87, 185–193 (2020).
-
D’Cruz, A.-M. et al. Reduced behavioral flexibility in autism spectrum disorders. Neuropsychology 27, 152–160 (2013).
-
Bos, D. J. et al. Rigidity coincides with reduced cognitive control to affective cues in children with autism. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 128, 431 (2019).
-
South, M., Newton, T. & Chamberlain, P. D. Delayed reversal learning and association with repetitive behavior in autism spectrum disorders. Autism Res. 5, 398–406 (2012).
-
Sedgewick, F., Hill, V., Yates, R., Pickering, L. & Pellicano, E. Gender differences in the social motivation and friendship experiences of autistic and non-autistic adolescents. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 46, 1297–1306 (2016).
-
Bargiela, S., Steward, R. & Mandy, W. The experiences of late-diagnosed women with autism spectrum conditions: an investigation of the female autism phenotype. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 46, 3281–3294 (2016).
-
Whitlock, A., Fulton, K., Lai, M., Pellicano, E. & Mandy, W. Recognition of girls on the autism spectrum by primary school educators: an experimental study. Autism Res. 13, 1358–1372 (2020).
-
Lawrence, K. E. et al. Neural responsivity to social rewards in autistic female youth. Transl. Psychiatry 10, 178 (2020).
-
Harrop, C. et al. Sex differences in social attention in autism spectrum disorder. Autism Res. 11, 1264–1275 (2018).
-
Kleberg, J. L., Nyström, P., Bölte, S. & Falck-Ytter, T. Sex differences in social attention in infants at risk for autism. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 49, 1342–1351 (2019).
-
Lillo, M. D. & Ferguson, H. J. Perspective-taking and social inferences in adolescents, young adults, and older adults. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 152, 1420–1438 (2023).
-
Rosenblau, G., Korn, C. W. & Pelphrey, K. A. A computational account of optimizing social predictions reveals that adolescents are conservative learners in social contexts. J. Neurosci. 38, 974–988 (2018).
-
Chistensen, R. ordinal—Regression models for ordinal data. R version 2025.12-29 CRAN https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.ordinal (2023).
-
Christensen, R. H. B. Cumulative link models for ordinal regression with the R Package ordinal. CRAN https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ordinal/vignettes/clm_article.pdf (2019).
-
Doyon, J. K., Shomstein, S. & Rosenblau, G. Feature identification learning both shapes and is shaped by spatial object-similarity representations. Commun. Psychol. 3, 77 (2025).
-
Diaconescu, A. O. et al. Hierarchical prediction errors in midbrain and septum during social learning. Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci. 12, 618–634 (2017).
-
Garrison, J., Erdeniz, B. & Done, J. Prediction error in reinforcement learning: a meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 37, 1297–1310 (2013).
-
Wagner, A. R. & Rescorla, A.R. A theory of Pavlovian conditioning: variations in the effectiveness of reinforcement and nonreinforcement. in Classical Conditioning II: Current Theory and Research (eds Black, A. H. & Prokasy, W. F.) 64–99 (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1972).
-
Sheppard, E., Pillai, D., Wong, G. T. L., Ropar, D. & Mitchell, P. How easy is it to read the minds of people with autism spectrum disorder?. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 46, 1247–1254 (2016).
-
Gernsbacher, M. A. & Yergeau, M. Empirical failures of the claim that autistic people lack a theory of mind. Arch. Sci. Psychol. 7, 102–118 (2019).
-
Rutter, M., Bailey, A., & Lord, C. SCQ: Social Communication Questionnaire (Western Psychological Services, 2003).
-
Bodfish, J. W., Symons, F. J., Parker, D. E. & Lewis, M. H. Varieties of repetitive behavior in autism: comparisons to mental retardation. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 30, 237–243 (2000).
-
Braem, S. & Egner, T. Getting a grip on cognitive flexibility. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 27, 470–476 (2018).
-
Ionescu, T. Exploring the nature of cognitive flexibility. New Ideas Psychol. 30, 190–200 (2012).
-
Uddin, L. Q. Cognitive and behavioural flexibility: neural mechanisms and clinical considerations. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 22, 167–179 (2021).
-
Dajani, D. R. & Uddin, L. Q. Demystifying cognitive flexibility: implications for clinical and developmental neuroscience. Trends Neurosci. 38, 571–578 (2015).
-
Kissine, M. Pragmatics, cognitive flexibility and autism spectrum disorders. Mind Lang. 27, 1–28 (2012).
-
Moseley, R., Hung, K. & Sui, J. Perceived neurotype of the other may affect self/other-representation in autistic people. Neurodiversity 3, 27546330251339560 (2025).
-
Feliciano, P. et al. SPARK: a US cohort of 50,000 families to accelerate autism research. Neuron 97, 488–493 (2018).
-
Sasson, N. J. et al. The Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire: prevalence and diagnostic classification. Autism Res. 6, 134–143 (2013).
-
White, C. N., Ratcliff, R. & Starns, J. J. Diffusion models of the flanker task: discrete versus gradual attentional selection. Cognit. Psychol. 63, 210–238 (2011).
-
Wiecki, T. V., Sofer, I. & Frank, M. J. HDDM: hierarchical Bayesian estimation of the drift-diffusion model in Python. Front. Neuroinformatics 7, 14 (2013).
-
Carpenter, B. et al. Stan: a probabilistic programming language. J. Stat. Softw. 76, 1 (2017).
-
Gabry, J., Češnovar, R., Johnson, A. & Bronder, S. cmdstanr: R interface to ‘CmdStan’. R package version 0.9.0. https://mc-stan.org/cmdstanr/ (2025).

Leave a Reply