One of the cardinal characteristics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a deficit in social interaction along with an inability to understand the beliefs and intentions of others. However, the computational mechanisms that underpin this social deficit are currently unclear. Recent theoretical accounts of ASD (Lawson et al., 2014; Van de Cruys et al., 2014) propose that deficits in understanding others may arise due to aberrant computation of socially-specific prediction errors.
