Behavioral research suggests that children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are able to understand the intentions of others when intention is communicated via an action on an object (nonsocial intention). However, the existing literature indicates that they are impaired in their ability to understand intention when it is cued using social-communicative cues (social intention). Across two separate studies, we expand upon the behavioral research conducted to date by examining the neural correlates associated with different types of intention understanding in typically developing adults, typically developing children, and children with ASD. In Study 1, we validate a new paradigm in typically developing adults for assessing intention understanding using the late positive component (LPC), which is an event related brain potential that has been associated with the processing of intention understanding broadly defined. Study 1 results indicate that the paradigm successfully differentiates between intentional and unintentional actions for both social and nonsocial stimuli, and that the magnitude of this difference (LPC effect), for the social stimuli only, is related to social functioning in this nonclinical sample. We then utilize this new paradigm in Study 2 to compare social and nonsocial intention understanding in children with ASD and typically developing controls. Highly consistent with the extant behavioral literature, results of Study 2 indicate that children with ASD are less accurate than typically developing controls in discriminating between social intentional and social unintentional actions, but perform equally well compared to their typically developing peers for nonsocial stimuli. In contrast to these behavioral results, no group differences were identified in LPC effect magnitude for either social or nonsocial intention understanding. However, paralleling results from Study 1, we identified a significant relationship between magnitude of the LPC social effect and level of impairment in social functioning such that as children (independent of diagnostic status) were less able to differentiate between intentional and unintentional actions at a neural level, degree of impairment in social functioning increased. As would be expected given prior research demonstrating intact nonsocial intention understanding in this population, no significant relationships were identified with the nonsocial LPC effect. Study 2 exploratory analyses indicated that social functioning alone was predictive of the magnitude of the LPC social effect. Taken together, results of these studies suggest that the LPC social intention understanding effect is not uniquely associated with ASD, but instead reflects individual differences in human social functioning, including the severe social impairments which characterize ASD.
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