We that people with with High Functioning Autism spontaneously/implicitly take the level 1 visual perspective of others (i.e. the perspective of others interferes with reporting their own if it's different), but have difficulties in doing so intentionally/explicitly (reporting the other's perspective). We suggest people with HFA's problematic attention shifts to be the cause: we think in order to explicitly take the perspective of someone else, you have to actively shift your attention away from your own perspective, which may be difficult for people with autism.
The ability of perspective taking is a fundamental aspect of social cognition. The ability to decide, what another person can or cannot see is referred to as “level 1 perspective taking.” This is thought to be a process that we can make use of intentionally, but which also takes place spontaneously. Autism is characterized by impairments of social interaction, which are thought to be related to deficits in implicit rather than explicit perspective taking. In order to assess both levels of processing with regard to perspective taking, we employed an established task in patients and controls. Our results demonstrate that both groups engage in spontaneous level 1 perspective taking. In contrast to controls, however, patients reacted more slowly if they had to verify the other’s as compared to their own perspective, which shows that participants with high-functioning autism have selective difficulties in explicit, but not implicit, level 1 perspective taking. These findings demonstrate that while spontaneous level 1 perspective taking appears to be intact in autism, this ability is impaired in patients when used explicitly.
Reference
Schwarzkopf, S., Schilbach, L., Vogeley, K., & Timmermans, B. (2014). Making it explicit makes a difference: Evidence for a dissociation of spontaneous and intentional level 1 perspective taking in high-functioning autism. Cognition, 131(3), 345-354