TY - JOUR T1 - Enhancing the precision of our understanding about mentalizing in adults with autism JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/034454 SP - 034454 AU - Michael V. Lombardo AU - Meng-Chuan Lai AU - Bonnie Auyeung AU - Rosemary J. Holt AU - Carrie Allison AU - Paula Smith AU - Bhismadev Chakrabarti AU - Amber N. V. Ruigrok AU - John Suckling AU - Edward T. Bullmore AU - MRC AIMS Consortium AU - Christine Ecker AU - Michael C. Craig AU - Declan G. M. Murphy AU - Francesa Happé AU - Simon Baron-Cohen Y1 - 2015/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/12/23/034454.abstract N2 - Difficulties in mentalizing or theory of mind are common autism spectrum conditions (ASC). However, heterogeneity in mentalizing ability between individuals with ASC is considerable, particularly in adulthood. Parsing this heterogeneity to come to more precise understanding of which individuals have difficulty has important implications, particularly for individualized approaches in clinical and translational research applications. Here we utilize unsupervised hierarchical clustering to identify data-driven subgroups within ASC based on performance on an advanced mentalizing test, the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’ Test (RMET). We find evidence for 2 discrete ASC subgroups that can be replicably identified across two large independent datasets. The first subgroup shows clear difficulty on the RMET, with an effect size difference compared to typically-developing controls (TD) of greater than 3 standard deviations. In contrast, the second subgroup shows little to no difficulty on the RMET compared to TD individuals. These ASC subgroups are not systematically different across a range of other variables including sex/gender, age, depression or anxiety symptoms, autistic traits, trait empathy, and autism symptom severity. Verbal IQ is slightly lower in the impaired ASC subgroup, but covarying for this does not change the effect of large difficulties in mentalizing in this subgroup. These insights enable a more precise understanding of mentalizing and may have important implications for future work that takes a more individualized approach to clinical assessment and treatment. Identification of these subgroups may also facilitate work examining multiple biological mechanisms underlying ASC in translational research. ER -