Autistic adults anticipate simple and complex narrative events

Purpose: Narratives are characterised by a temporal sequence of events and characters’ causally connected actions. Thus, predicting forthcoming events is central to narrative understanding. Here we report an experiment that investigated anticipation of narrative events in autistic adults, who have previously been shown to have atypical narrative cognition.

Method: Using the visual world paradigm, N = 25 autistic and N = 25 neurotypical adults (matched on age, sex, and IQ) listened to non-social and social narratives in which a simple or complex context elicited anticipation of a subsequent outcome. For each narrative event, eye movements were tracked to four pictures, including two that depicted potential context-relevant outcomes.

Results: For non-social narratives, autistic (relative to neurotypical) adults were delayed in anticipating simple (i.e., factual), but faster in anticipating complex (i.e., counterfactual), narrative events. For social narratives, autistic adults were faster to anticipate simple narrative events (requiring basic mentalising of a character’s desires and intentions), and neither group successfully anticipated complex narrative events. Both tasks revealed a stronger constraint from real-world knowledge in anticipating narrative events in neurotypical adults, leading to delayed anticipation of non-real events and persistent interference from the task-irrelevant reality.

Conclusion: Results show that autistics adults can successfully anticipate events in narratives, but do not achieve this consistently across narrative types; difficulties are not specific to social contexts. Instead, different predictive strategies are adopted, with autistic adults tending to be less grounded in real-world knowledge and more adaptive to imagined alternatives than neurotypical adults.