Short Report: Autistic people outperform neurotypicals in a cartoon version of the RME

Prior research suggests that while autistic people demonstrate poorer facial emotion recognition when stimuli are human, these differences lessen when stimuli are anthropomorphic. To investigate this further, this work explores emotion recognition in autistic and neurotypical adults (n=196). Groups were compared on a standard and a cartoon version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. Results indicated that while autistic individuals performed similarly to neurotypicals on the standard version, they outperformed them on the cartoon version. The implications for these findings regarding emotion recognition deficit and the social motivation account of autism are discussed and support the view of socio-cognitive differences rather than deficits in this population.