Summary: New research shows people on the autism spectrum are more likely to view mind and body as unified, while neurotypical people tend to think of mind and body as separate.
Source: Northeastern University
A study led by Northeastern University professor Iris Berent finds that the intuitive separation between mind and body—often called dualism—appears to arise naturally in neurotypical individuals and is linked to social-cognitive mechanisms rather than being solely a product of culture.
Published in the Nov. 30 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study, conducted by Berent and Rachel Theodore of the University of Connecticut (a Northeastern alum), reports that people with autism are more likely than neurotypical people to perceive the mind as integrated with the body.
Berent, a cognitive psychologist, says the findings have broad implications for how we understand science, religion and psychiatric conditions.
“It really affects how we think about everything,” she says, describing the distinction as dualism: the view that the mind is something fundamentally different from the body.
Berent notes that dualist intuitions emerge early in life and appear across cultures. “Even young children show these beliefs,” she explains, indicating that dualism is not simply a Western cultural artifact.
The study links dualist thinking to a core social-cognitive ability known as theory of mind (ToM). ToM is the capacity to recognize that others have emotions, desires, beliefs and intentions, and to infer those mental states from observable behavior.
“You infer what another person is thinking or feeling by observing their actions,” Berent says, adding that even infants demonstrate early forms of this reasoning. For example, three-month-old infants prefer a helper over a hinderer, suggesting they perceive others in goal-directed terms.
Because people on the autism spectrum often score lower on theory-of-mind measures, they tend to have greater difficulty reading others’ mental states. According to Berent, this reduced ToM contributes to autistic individuals’ tendency to see mental states as more tightly bound to the body.
In the study’s first experiment, participants—both autistic and neurotypical—were asked to imagine a future replica of their body and to indicate which psychological features would appear in that replica: thoughts or actions. Autistic participants were more likely than neurotypical participants to say that thoughts would transfer to the replica, a pattern consistent with viewing mental traits as embodied.
A second experiment asked participants to consider which traits would survive after death. Here, only neurotypical participants tended to believe thoughts could persist after the body’s demise; autistic participants did not. From these results, Berent concludes that autistic people view thoughts as more anchored in the body, while neurotypical people are relatively more dualist and more likely to imagine disembodied persistence.
Dualist intuition can help explain beliefs about an afterlife or a soul separate from the body, Berent notes. However, she warns that dualism can also interfere with scientific understanding and contribute to stigma for people with psychiatric disorders by encouraging the idea that mental illness is not rooted in the body.
“This is the first study to link this thinking about bodies and minds to something core to the human psyche—namely, theory of mind,” Berent says. She adds that while dualism may be a common natural intuition, it poses costs for public understanding of disease and health: it helps explain why mental health is often treated differently from physical health, even though psychiatric disorders arise from the brain.
About this autism and psychology research news
Author: Press Office
Source: Northeastern University
Contact: Press Office – Northeastern University
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Original Research: Closed access. “Autism attenuates the perception of the mind-body divide” by Iris Berent et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Abstract
Autism attenuates the perception of the mind-body divide
People commonly display intuitive dualism, regarding the mind as distinct or ethereal compared with the body. This research asks whether dualist thinking naturally follows from two conflicting principles that guide reasoning about physical objects on one hand and the minds of agents on the other—principles captured by theory of mind (ToM).
To test this idea, the authors examine dualist reasoning in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a congenital condition known to affect ToM. If dualism relies on ToM, then ASD should reduce dualist tendencies and increase physicalist views that treat psychological traits as embodied.
Experiment 1 finds that, relative to neurotypical controls, people with ASD are more likely to view psychological traits as embodied and likely to appear in a replica of the body. Experiment 2 shows that, unlike controls, people with ASD do not assume thoughts persist after bodily death. Experiment 3 links embodied perceptions with a greater tendency toward nativist assumptions, and Experiment 4 reveals that among neurotypical participants, weaker ToM skills correlate with more physicalist judgments.
Together, these findings are the first to demonstrate that ASD attenuates dualist reasoning and to connect dualist intuitions with theory of mind, suggesting that the mind-body distinction may arise naturally from social-cognitive processes.