Controlled laboratory environments are great, don’t get me wrong.  I hate the messy real world, with its confusing morass of different measurable and unmeasurable variables, just as much as the next researcher.  I realize why we often want to take people away from that messy quagmire and into a nice room where we can shove them in front of a computer and show them pictures and stuff, while we track their eye gaze or while we have them push little buttons or while we record their brain activity.  Or why we often want to present them with a made-up scenario and see what they think of it.  That sort of thing.

However, there’s a limit to what we can do with this approach.

Human interaction is complex.  Laboratory studies of this type can reveal many things relevant to autistic people’s social interactions, like aversion to eye gaze (e.g., Hadjikhani et al., 2017), face expression identification difficulties (e.g., Tanaka et al., 2012), and challenges with perspective-taking (e.g., Happé, 1994).

There are also things that it can’t reveal.  For example, I’ve yet to hear an autistic person talking about how easy it is to navigate social interactions in large groups of people.  Sure, some of us are great public speakers, but that’s different: there’s only one speaker, so social information-processing demands are low.  In a small group interaction, we have to monitor a whole bunch of people, somehow figure out whose turn it is to speak, etc.  It’s exhausting and difficult.  It’s easier to interact one-on-one.  Now, to me, that’s at least as interesting as an aversion to eye gaze, but is it something you can tell by showing people pictures on a computer?  Not really.

In addition to the problem that some things just can’t be studied well in traditional laboratory paradigms, there’s also the issue that findings in the laboratory environment may not generalize to the real world very well (Kingstone et al., 2003).  Furthermore, in the real world, there’s usually lots of things happening all at once.  That’s something we don’t see in the lab, because we try and keep everything nicely controlled.  However, autistic people might have to struggle to process social situations more effortfully and consciously than their neurotypical peers – that’s why groups are harder than one-on-one interactions, remember?  Well, here’s a question: Does it follow that autistic people’s performance on a laboratory-based social task performed with no distractions present will generalize to a real-world situation filled with distractions and processing demands?  Not necessarily!

And then there’s the interactional nature of social interaction.  By definition, there’s at least two people in any interaction, but research has historically tended to focus on just one: the autistic person.  Fortunately, recent studies are beginning to subject typically-developing people’s role in interactions with autistic people to real scrutiny, and they’ve demonstrated that autistic people’s style – not the substance of our interaction – is probably driving many of our social difficulties (Grossman, 2015; Sasson et al., 2017).  These studies technically used computer stimuli in controlled environments, and it’s clearly an approach that is working and revealing vital information.  However, wouldn’t it be fascinating to see investigations of how typically-developing people’s attitudes and judgements affect social interactions in naturalistic settings?

Now, am I saying we should go and completely abandon experimenter control?  Hardly.  All I’m saying is that there are ways we can improve the naturalistic validity of our studies.  For example, instead of putting people in front of a computer screen, we could engage them in a live (but to a greater or lesser extent controlled) interaction, perhaps manipulating one variable in the process, and then we could record outcomes.

(Also, if anyone wants to accuse me of preaching an idea and then not practicing it, I plead the excuse that I’m just a junior graduate student with few resources and, along with many other ideas, naturalistic studies are currently on my long-term to-do list.)

 

What do you think of this?  Comment below!

References

Grossman, R. B. (2015). Judgments of social awkwardness from brief exposure to children with and without high-functioning autism. Autism, 19(5), 580–587. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361314536937

Hadjikhani, N., Åsberg Johnels, J., Zürcher, N. R., Lassalle, A., Guillon, Q., Hippolyte, L., … Gillberg, C. (2017). Look me in the eyes: constraining gaze in the eye-region provokes abnormally high subcortical activation in autism. Scientific Reports, 7: 3163. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-03378-5

Happé, F. G. E. (1994). An advanced test of theory of mind: Understanding of story characters’ thoughts and feelings by able autistic, mentally handicapped, and normal children and adults. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 24(2), 129–154. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02172093

Kingstone, A., Smilek, D., Ristic, J., Kelland Friesen, C., & Eastwood, J. D. (2003). Attention, researchers! It is time to take a look at the real world. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12(5), 176–180. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.01255

Sasson, N. J., Faso, D. J., Nugent, J., Lovell, S., Kennedy, D. P., & Grossman, R. B. (2017). Neurotypical peers are less willing to interact with those with autism based on thin slice judgments. Scientific Reports, 7: 40700. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep40700

Tanaka, J. W., Wolf, J. M., Klaiman, C., Koenig, K., Cockburn, J., Herlihy, L., … Schultz, R. T. (2012). The perception and identification of facial emotions in individuals with autism spectrum disorders using the Let’s Face It! Emotion Skills Battery. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 53(12), 1259–1267. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2012.02571.x