Mentalizing refers to making inferences about other people's mental states, whereas visuospatial perspective taking refers to inferring other people's viewpoints. Both abilities seem vital for social functioning; yet, their exact relationship is unclear. We directly compared mentalizing and visuospatial perspective taking in nineteen adults with…

Identifying threatening expressions is a significant social perceptual skill. Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are impaired in social interaction, show deficits in face and emotion processing, show amygdala abnormalities and display a disadvantage in the perception of social threat. According to the anger superiority hypothesis,…

The authors investigated whether differences in facial stimuli could explain the inconsistencies in the facial attractiveness literature regarding whether adults prefer more masculine- or more feminine-looking male faces. Their results demonstrated that use of a female average to dimorphically transform a male facial average produced stimuli that…

Thirty-one infant siblings of children with autism and 24 comparison infants were tested at 6 months of age during social interaction with a caregiver, using a modified Still Face paradigm conducted via a closed-circuit TV-video system. In the Still Face paradigm, the mother interacts with the infant, then freezes and displays a neutral,…

Understanding the intentional actions of others is a fundamental part of human social cognition and behavior. An important question is therefore whether other animal species, especially our nearest relatives the chimpanzees, also understand the intentional actions of others. Here we show that chimpanzees spontaneously (without training) behave…