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Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)

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Re: Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)

#101

Post by supriyo-biswas »

astrobe_ wrote: post #45
soulofmischief wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the Japanese concept of Tsukumogami[0], where certain objects that live to be 100 years old become imbued with a soul. It's easy to get sentimental over neglected things because I seem to have an innate appreciation and sense of duty toward objects that are designed to help people. It only seems fair that the contract includes care and maintenance from the user. I live in an aging neighborhood and weep for som…

Yes, Tsukumogami is I believe an instance of animism [1]. AFAIK I am not affected by autism, but I distinctly remember when as a child I refused to eat something because that thing didn't "want" to be eaten. I guess that from my parent's perspective, it was just their child's whim-of-the-day. But that memory makes me think that animism is something natural - perhaps some sort "bug" in the system that make us attribut…

Thank you for sharing your experience.

I remember a similar experience as a child when I started crying because my dad would pop a balloon; because I believed that it was not meant to be burst and asked him to repair it afterwards.

I can now take some comfort in the fact that I was not in fact, too weird :)

Re: Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)

#103

Post by fch42 »

sim7c00 wrote: post #7
sea-gold wrote: post #2

This sounds fascinating. Too bad the paper is not freely available. Side note: Be sure to check out Unpaywall[1][2] which allows you to (legally!!!) read research papers for free. [1]: https://unpaywall.org/products/extension [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31271101

haha thanks, i was just thinking how cruel for the paper to paywall it!!

I can't begin imagining how the paper feels about being pimped out for money...

Re: Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)

#105

Post by amelius »

sctb wrote: post #8

I don't have access to the full text, but based on the abstract I think it's likely that I relate to this phenomenon (I am autistic). My experience is not so much the attribution of human characteristics to non-human objects, but I understand why this might be the only accessible language of expression. For me, if a useful object is damaged or otherwise loses its usefulness through neglect or malice, I experience som…

I don't know but maybe it helps if you try to look at things from the other perspective.

For example in your dull knife example, maybe you could think: "the knife can now be happy because it doesn't need to be so dangerous anymore and it can make friends with the other cutlery in the drawer"

It sounds silly, buy maybe it helps.

Re: Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)

#106

Post by LiKao »

mjburgess wrote: post #23
qoez wrote: post #6

I always had the impression it was the other way around, non autistic 'normal' people personifies non human objects. Anyway I always had a pet theory that the reason some people are fooled into thinking LLM text output is a real human with feelings, and some aren't, comes down to this difference in brains. (Personally I never feel like the LLM is a real human and I'm kind of autistic too.)

I think there's different kinds of autism, which imv, you could spread across a schizophrenia axis -- "low reality" and "high reality" sorts. My own classification system: The more schizophrenic kind imparts a fantasy framing on everything which can give rise to a disorganised imparting of mental capacities that I think is fairly uniform across objects, including people. This appears as "too few mental capacities" on…

Interesting that you use some kind of schizophrenia axis.

There is actually some scientists that hypothesize schizophrenia and autism are exact opposites of each other. It's call the predictive coding hypothesis of autism.

In essence the predictive coding hypothesis assumes that large parts of our brain function like a modern video codec. Always predicting the next states and reducing information by only picking up on prediction errors that need to be encoded separatedly.

Under this hypothesis schizophrenia arises, if there is a very strong predictive coding and very little influence of the prediction errors. You hear voices out of noise, because your prediction mechanism tries to encode these noises as something sensible.

On the other hand in autism you have very little prediction and high external influence (i.e. the normal information reduction doesn't take place).

There are some studies that try to pick up the prediction vs. error components in simple cognitive tasks that support this idea.

Re: Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)

#107

Post by r721 »

j4coh wrote: post #5

I always thought this was something I got from watching The Brave Little Toaster and similar content when I was tiny.

Fun fact: The Brave Little Toaster is based on a story by Thomas M. Disch, who is a pretty interesting sci-fi writer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_M._Disch

Re: Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)

#108

Post by LiKao »

_0ffh wrote: post #25
qoez wrote: post #6

I always had the impression it was the other way around, non autistic 'normal' people personifies non human objects. Anyway I always had a pet theory that the reason some people are fooled into thinking LLM text output is a real human with feelings, and some aren't, comes down to this difference in brains. (Personally I never feel like the LLM is a real human and I'm kind of autistic too.)

> I always had the impression it was the other way around, non autistic 'normal' people personifies non human objects. The paper says, they do! The surprising part is that autist do it too , at approximately the same rates, which was unexpected.

Not at the same rates, but at higher rates than the general population and even stronger:

""" Together, our results indicate that object personification occurs commonly among autistic individuals, and perhaps more often (and later in life) than in the general population. """

This is well known for many autistic people. "I put this thing there, and now it has to stay at that position, because otherwise it will be very sad."

The surprising part is not that autistic people do have empathy for inanimate objects (this is so well known, it's even covered in some diagnostic tests), but rather to find further confirmation and compare it to the general population. Mostly because this is surprising, as in general autism is related to empathy disfunction, so it is surprising to observe empathy at higher rates (see below).

However, as many researchers have pointed out that is exactely what would be expected. Empathy disfunction is incorrectly interpreted by many as "lack of empathy". But empathy means understanding and representing the emotional state of another living creature. Assigning emotional states to inanimate objects is by definition an empathy disfunction, because you are mentally representing something that is not there in the real world. Same with over-empathy that is reported by some autistics. Since these are over-representing the emotional states of others, this is also a disfunction (i.e. a mismatch between observed subject and the representation).

So the article builds strongly on the false equivalence between empathy disfunction and lack of empathy.

Re: Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)

#109

Post by LiKao »

Aziell wrote: post #99

Something I’ve been thinking about is whether it’s partly because people sometimes don’t really know how to describe what they’re feeling, so they end up putting those emotions onto objects. It kind of helps make sense of feelings that are hard to explain. At the same time, I wonder if it’s always a good thing. Like, what happens if you lose or break something you’ve gotten really attached to? Could that make the anx…

Yes, this is very common. Autistic people can easily go into meltdown if they loose an object that they assign emotional states to.

In severe cases it can be sufficient if the object is slightly moved to trigger a meltdown, and there are reports that support those exact thinking patterns.

Re: Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)

#110

Post by LiKao »

seabird wrote: post #94
earnestinger wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for all the languages that actually call the grammatical concept: gender Edit: see German example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender_in_German

Yeah man, I know that it's traditionally called gender, and I know that German has a gender and case system. I don't understand what the link you've posted has to do with my point, I'm really not sure what there is to misunderstand about what I'm saying. To come all the way back to what my original comment was about -- a German speaker is not ascribing any sort of sociological femininity to words like Freiheit or Bun…

There is some research that goes in the opposite direction. I.e. that especially in german the lack gender in the word for girls ("das Mädchen") is actually quite problematic and can lead to girls not thinking they really have a gender before they grow up. At least up to a certain age, where children learn to separate between grammatical gender and social gender or biological sex.
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