Social cognition is sensory processing applied to the most complex, unpredictable stimulus environment humans encounter: other people. How you filter sound determines whether you can follow a conversation. How you process faces determines what social signals you detect. How you read your own body determines what emotions you recognise in yourself and others.
If those sensory channels work differently, the social experience is different: a different social umwelt.
The paradigm shift
The double empathy problem — the concept that changed the field. Social difficulty between autistic and neurotypical people is bidirectional. The Crompton diffusion chain studies show autistic-autistic communication is as effective as neurotypical-neurotypical communication. The problem is at the interface, not in the autistic person.
Theory of Mind — rise and fall — how a single 1985 experiment dominated thirty years of autism research, why it’s being superseded, and the harm “mindblindness” framing caused to autistic people, clinical practice, and research.
How autistic social life works
Autistic social experience — monotropism, small group versus large group dynamics, social technologies, communication mode preferences, interest-based connection. What social life looks like when attention distributes differently and sensory channels process the social world through a different umwelt.
Masking and camouflaging — what happens when autistic people suppress their natural social behaviour to perform neurotypicality. The documented mental health costs, and the difference between choosing to adapt and being required to.
Alexithymia and autism — difficulty identifying one’s own emotions co-occurs with autism in ~50% of cases. Much of what is attributed to “autistic empathy deficit” is actually alexithymia, a separate construct that confounds social cognition research.
The contested territory
Social skills training — a critical assessment — the most common intervention, critically examined. What it teaches (neurotypical performance), what the evidence shows (modest short-term effects, limited transfer), and what would be better (environmental design, autistic-autistic connection, bidirectional training).
ABA and sensory processing — how behaviour modification approaches handle social behaviour, and why targeting social performance rather than social satisfaction misses the point.
The sensory foundations
Social cognition is built on sensory processing. These pages document the connections:
- Auditory processing in autism — the cocktail party problem is a social-sensory problem
- Tactile processing in autism — C-tactile afferents and social touch
- Interoception in autism — reading your own body to read others’ emotions
- Visual processing in autism — facial expression processing and visual social signals