Masayuki Watanabe* and Miyuki Endo
A key characteristic associated with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) is impairment in communication and sociability. Such impairments have been attributed exclusively to a deficit in theory of mind; however, this thesis has been widely challenged. People with ASD do not necessarily struggle with all forms of perspective-taking. Although people with ASD perform poorly in explicit visual perspective-taking tasks, they perform no worse than typically developing people do in implicit visual perspective-taking tasks. This study attempted to explain this discrepancy by focusing on the embodied self and self-awareness. This study offered the following supposition for ASD-related weakness in visual perspective-taking: Explicit visual perspective-taking is enabled by the person detaching their embodied representational self from their somatic sensations; people with ASD struggle to accomplish such detachment because their representational self is too strongly anchored to their somatic sensations owing to their excessively acute self-awareness. As for implicit visual perspective-taking, such perspective-taking is an intersubjective phenomenon that occurs when the self–other distinction is loosened. Therefore, the observation that people with ASD can accomplish implicit visual perspective-taking must be attributable to the persistence of this loosening mechanism. From these suppositions, this study proposed the following developmental model for people with ASD: Unable to control their unstable somesthesis, people with ASD develop somesthetic disorder, creating an atypical embodied self, which ultimately manifests in social impairment. This approach implies that ASD-related researchers and educators should devote greater attention to somesthesis typical to ASD and the atypical embodied self it generates.
