Difficulties in appreciating non-literal speech, such as irony in ASDs have been explained as due to impairments in social understanding and in recognizing the speaker’s communicative intention. Social and communication impairments are part of the essential diagnostic criteria used to define Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs). In addition, the results also suggest that on average women use both cognitive empathy (dorsal mPFC) and affective empathy (vmPFC) networks more than men for false-belief reasoning. Taken together, these results are in line with the extreme male brain (EMB) hypothesis by demonstrating sex difference in the neural basis of ToM and pragmatic language, both of which are found to be impaired in individuals with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC). The results suggest a significant overlap between neural bases of pragmatic language comprehension and ToM in both men and women. However, we did not find difference in the brain activity between the sexes during the FB condition relative to the CS condition. We also found a greater activity in the left medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and a greater deactivation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)/orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) bilaterally in women compared to men. During the FB condition relative to the baseline (unlinked sentences ), we found convergent activity in ToM network regions, such as the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) bilaterally and precuneus, in both sexes.

We measured the hemodynamic responses of men and women while they performed a second-order false-belief (FB) task and a coherent story (CS) task. Increasing research evidence suggests that women are more advanced than men in pragmatic language comprehension and Theory of Mind (ToM), which is a cognitive component of empathy. We conclude that naturalistic, multidimensional approaches may be productively applied alongside traditional tasks to facilitate a more nuanced picture of mindreading in adulthood, and to ensure construct validity whilst remaining sensitive to variation at the upper echelons of the ability. We focus on selected examples of core experimental paradigms including emotion recognition tests, social vignettes, narrative fiction (prose and film) and participative interaction (in real and virtual worlds), highlighting challenges for studies with NT adult cohorts. We first outline a case for studying mindreading in NT adults and proceed to review tests of emotion perception, cognitive and affective mentalizing, and multidimensional tasks combining these facets. Empirical mindreading research has predominantly featured children, groups with autism spectrum disorder and clinical samples, and many standard tasks suffer ceiling effects with neurologically typical (NT) adults. Mindreading refers to the ability to attribute mental states, including thoughts, intentions and emotions, to oneself and others, and is essential for navigating the social world.

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