Thread by @cjcrompton

Our paper “Autistic peer to peer information transfer is highly effective” is out open-access @journalautism! I’m so excited!

We wanted to know if information transfer was different between autistic people, non-autistic people, and mixed groups.

THREAD

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13…

Sharing information with other people relies on good communication. Lots of studies into autism & communication focus on how a single person performs on a social task, e.g. a theory of mind task. But communication involves more than one person, and is influenced by social context

We wanted to find out how autistic & non-autistic people interact & share information + whether it’s different when they’re with autistic or non-autistic people. To do this, we used a diffusion chain task which is like the game “telephone” (illustrated by @scrappapertiger)

We recruited nine groups, each with eight people. In three of the groups, everyone was autistic; in three of the groups, everyone was non-autistic; and three of the groups were mixed groups where half the group was autistic and half the group was non-autistic.

We told one person in each group a story. They shared it with another person, who shared it with another person, and so on, across the whole group. The story was about a bear (illustrated by @Loojz!)

We looked at how many story details had been shared at each stage.

(Here is a video that @StoriesOfImpact made about the methods and results of our study
youtube.com/watch?v=dEvg4t…. There are transcripts of this video available here (thanks to @OliviaRifai!) dart.ed.ac.uk/diversity-in-s…)

Autistic people shared information with other autistic people as well as non-autistic people did with other non-autistic people.

However, in the mixed groups of autistic and non-autistic people, much less information was shared.

(more detail on this in the paper, obvs!)

Participants were also asked how they felt they had got on with the other person in the interaction. The people in the mixed groups also experienced lower rapport with the person they were sharing the story with compared to the autistic and non-autistic groups.

This finding is important as it shows that autistic people have the skills to share information well with one another and experience good rapport, and that there are selective problems when autistic and non-autistic people are interacting.

Side note - we did dig into this a bit more using interviews and qualitative analysis, to find out a bit more about how this works in the real world – you can read our paper on this here
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

This is part of a bigger project we’ve been doing called Diversity in Social Intelligence – you can find more information and read all of our outputs on our website

dart.ed.ac.uk/research/nd-iq

And if you want *even* more information about our research, here's a 15 minute video by @StoriesOflmpact, featuring @SueReviews, @scrappapertiger, @Fiona_Clarke_ and @autgeek here

youtube.com/watch?v=xZcLW6…

A *huge* thanks to the participants, to PI @SueReviews, co-authors @DaniRopar & @egflynn, @scrappapertiger & @Loojz for the illustrations, & to our genuinely excellent peer reviewers whoever you are – the paper is much-improved thanks to you!

I’m *so* glad this is out! Yay!

Whoops, this should be @EgfEmma! 👋