Is Social Categorization the Missing Link Between Weak Central Coherence and Mental State Inference Abilities in Autism? Preliminary Evidence from a General Population Sample

In the current experiment, we have operationalized mental state inferences as falling somewhere on a continuum from local to global. We do not believe, however, that mental state inferences so simply and straightforwardly map onto this local–global continuum in all situations. Rather, if mental state inferences rely crucially on social categorization as we propose, then all those factors that affect which particular social categories become salient (or activated) in a given context should equally impact on the activation of particular mental state inferences in context (including, for example, the accessibility of particular categories in memory relative to others, the degree of covariation between stimulus inputs and categories stored in memory, the perceiver’s goals in the current situation etc.). We chose to operationalize social categorization—and by extension mental state inferences—in the way we have in the current experiment simply because it most closely mirrors common operationalizations of weak central coherence in the ASD literature.