Si tratta di una ricerca sui fattori che intervengono nell'apprendimento della matematica, a livello scolastico secondario di II grado, condotta attraverso un'analisi delle convinzioni, intese come attitudini, attribuzioni, aspettative e stereotipi. La ricerca mette in luce i processi interazionali che intervengono nel concetto di sè matematico, negli stili attribuzionali di successo e insuccesso e nella socializzazione, primaria e secondaria, ai ruoli di genere.

Collective memories are precious resources for the society, because they contribute to strengthening the emotional bonding between community members, maintaining groups cohesion, and directing future behavior. Understanding the formation of the collective memories of emotional upheavals is important to a better comprehension of people's reactions and of the consequences on their psychological health. Previous studies investigated the effects of single traumatizing events, but few of them applied a quantitative approach to analyze the different psychological processes associated to the collective memories formation of upheavals on a large scale. This thesis explores the opportunities of applying quantitative methods to the study of collective memories in a collaborative environment such as the English Wikipedia. First, the presence of commemoration processes in Wikipedia articles and talk pages about traumatic events will be investigated through the analysis of edit activity patterns. Second, natural language processing techniques will be applied to detect differences in the collective representations of traumatic and non traumatic events, in the temporal focus of old and recent traumatic events, and in the representations of natural and human-made disasters. Third, the temporal evolution of language related to emotional, cognitive and social processes will be analyzed in the talk pages of two different emotional upheavals, the 2005 London bombings and the 2011 Egyptian revolution. The results will confirm the interpretation of Wikipedia as a global memory place, and highlight specific psychological processes related to the formation of collective memories of different types of traumatic events, opening the way to the quantitative study of collective memory formation in digital collaborative environments.

People with impaired physical or mental ability often find it challenging to negotiate crowded or unfamiliar environments, leading to a vicious cycle of deteriorating mobility and sociability. In particular, crowded environments pose a challenge to the comfort and safety of those people. To address this issue we present a novel two-level motion planning framework to be embedded efficiently in portable devices. At the top level, the long term planner deals with crowded areas, permanent or temporary anomalies in the environment (e.g., road blocks, wet floors), and hard and soft constraints (e.g., "keep a toilet within reach of 10 meters during the journey", "always avoid stairs"). A priority tailored on the user's needs can also be assigned to the constraints. At the bottom level, the short term planner anticipates undesirable circumstances in real time, by verifying simulation traces of local crowd dynamics against temporal logical formulae. The model takes into account the objectives of the user, preexisting knowledge of the environment and real time sensor data. The algorithm is thus able to suggest a course of action to achieve the user’s changing goals, while minimising the probability of problems for the user and other people in the environment. An accurate model of human behaviour is crucial when planning motion of a robotic platform in human environments. The Social Force Model (SFM) is such a model, having parameters that control both deterministic and stochastic elements. The short term planner embeds the SFM in a control loop that determines higher level objectives and reacts to environmental changes. Low level predictive modelling is provided by the SFM fed by sensors; high level logic is provided by statistical model checking. To parametrise and improve the short term planner, we have conducted experiments to consider typical human interactions in crowded environments. We have identified a number of behavioural patterns which may be explicitly incorporated in the SFM to enhance its predictive power. To validate our hierarchical motion planner we have run simulations and experiments with elderly people within the context of the DALi European project. The performance of our implementation demonstrates that our technology can be successfully embedded in a portable device or robot.

We address the issue of domain adaptation for automatic Personality Recognition from Text (PRT). The PRT task consists in the classification of the personality traits of some authors, given some pieces of text they wrote. The purpose of our work is to improve current approaches to PRT in order to extract personality information from social network sites, which is a really challenging task. We argue that current approaches, based on supervised learning, have several limitations for the adaptation to social network domain, mainly due to 1) difficulties in data annotation, 2) overfitting, 3) lack of domain adaptability and 4) multilinguality issues. We propose and test a new approach to PRT, that we will call Adaptive Personality Recognition (APR). We argue that this new approach solves domain adaptability problems and it is suitable for the application in Social Network Sites. We start from an introduction that covers all the background knowledge required for understanding PRT. It includes arguments like personality, the the Big5 factor model, the sets of correlations between language features and personality traits and a brief survey on learning approaches, that includes also feature selection and domain adaptation. We also provide an overview of the state-of-theart in PRT and we outline the problems we see in the application of PRT to social network domain. Basically, our APR approach is based on 1) an external model: a set of features/correlations between language and Big5 personality traits (taken from literature); 2) an adaptive strategy, that makes the model fit the distribution of the features in the dataset at hand, before generating personality hypotheses; 3) an evaluation strategy, that compares all the hypotheses generated for each single text of each author, computing confidence scores. This allows domain adaptation, semi-supervised learning and the automatic extraction of patterns associated to personality traits, that can be added to the initial correlation set, thus combining top-down and bottom-up approaches. The main contributions of our approach to the research in the field of PRT are: 1) the possibility to run top-down PRT from models taken from literature, adapting them to new datasets; 2) the definition of a small, language-independent and resource-free feature/ correlation set, tested on Italian and English; 3) the possibility to integrate top-down and bottom-up PRT strategies, allowing the enrichment of the initial feature/correlation from the dataset at hand; 4) the development of a system for APR, that does not require large labeled datasets for training, but just a small one for testing, minimizing the data annotation problem. Finally, we describe some applications of APR to the analysis of personality in online social network sites, reporting results and findings. We argue that the APR approach is very useful for Social Network Analysis, social marketing, opinion mining, sentiment analysis, mood detection and related fields.

Perception of moral violations and people’s misbehaviours are crucial elements that allow people to live in the society. The literature suggested that both explicit and implicit processes are involved in the moral cognition (Cameron et al., 2012). However still nowadays, the majority of the literature focused only on the explicit aspects of morality, while scarce attention was given to the study of implicit moral attitudes (Cameron et al., 2018). Furthermore, researchers on morality are currently attracting by the investigation of moral cognition in people with impairments in social cognition (e.g., people with autism spectrum disorder; ASD) who may process the moral violations differently compared neurotypical people (see e.g., Gallese, 2006), However, this line of research is at the beginning stage, and the use of implicit measures to understand the mechanisms underpinning the morality in autism (or in people with high autistic traits) have not yet been considered in previous studies. The present dissertation aimed to investigate important aspects of moral cognition that currently are still under-investigated in literature, offering a wider view on implicit aspects of morality in autism. Through six experiments, this work wanted to provide new empirical findings concerning the implicit mechanisms underpinning moral cognition in both neurotypical and autistic people without intellectual disability. Experiment 1 and 2 According to Moral Foundation Theory (Graham et al., 2013) specific emotions are associated to different types of moral violations. For instance, when people perceive that a victim is physically or emotionally harmed by someone else, they feel anger against the perpetrator. By contrast, people feel disgust when they perceive that someone ate inedible food or made blasphemous practices (Haidt et al., 1993). However, empirical finding that assessed the link between different types of moral violations and specific emotions showed mixed results. Indeed, it was suggested that other important factors might also modulate the relations between different moral violations and emotions (Atari et al., 2020; Kemper & Newheiser, 2018). Specifically, the benign violation hypothesis (McGraw & Warren, 2010) claimed that sometimes people could perceive moral violations as amusing, and this specific emotion seems elicited by specific contextual (e.g., psychological distance) as well as interpersonal factors (e.g., humor traits). However, previous studies never tested whether people perceive amusement in response to all types of moral violation, or whether amusement emerged only in response to specific norm violations (e.g., purity violations). Furthermore recently, Dempsey and colleagues (2020a) emphasized the importance to test the assumptions of Moral Foundation Theory in autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). Interviewing six autistic participants, the authors found that the participants endorsed all moral domains as morally relevant. However, the relations between emotional reaction and moral domains in autism have never been tested, as well as whether autistic people perceive moral violations as benign and amusing. In the first two experiments of this thesis, it was assessed the amusement reaction in response to different types of moral violations (purity vs. harm) and extending such investigation involving a group of autistic participants. Furthermore, the studies conducted so far on moral cognition has prevalently used explicit methodology. By contrast, in these experiments it was assessed the emotional reaction in response to different types of moral violations analysing the spontaneous facial expressions in neurotypical people (experiment 1), and the cardiac response of both typical and autistic individuals (experiment 2). The aim of these experiments was to investigate whether neurotypical people perceive specific types of moral violations as benign and amusing, and then whether autistic people expressed different emotions compared neurotypical people in response to different types of moral violations. Experiment 3, 4 and 5 As opposite of Moral Foundation Theory, the Dyadic Model claimed that a sine qua non for moral perception is the implicit activation of harm (Gray et al., 2012). In other words, always immorality automatically activates perceptions of harm regardless of someone is harmed (acts which involve physical and emotional damage; harm violations) or not (i.e., acts which involve impure and degradation behaviour; purity violations). Indeed, empirical evidence suggested that, during the reading of a scenario depicting a harmless moral violation in the domain of purity, people nevertheless implicitly infer that harm was involved. Across three experiments, we tested whether ostensibly harmless moral violations activated implicitly the harm concept. In all these three experiments the participants’ implicit attitude in response to moral violations was tested by using the affective misattribution paradigm (AMP; Payne et al., 2014), which is one of the most reliable methods to assess individual unconscious mental processes in psychology (Znanewitz et al., 2018). Specifically, Experiment 3 aimed to replicate previous findings which highlighted the implicit role of harm in response to harmless moral violations (Gray et al., 2014). Experiment 4 extended previous results with an investigation aimed to verify whether people with high autistic traits showed less implicit activation of harm in response to harmless scenarios than people with low autistic traits. Finally, Experiment 5 aimed to investigate whether autistic people (without intellectual disability) implicitly activated the harm concept in response to harmless scenarios as well as neurotypicals. Experiment 6 The majority of the studies which investigated the moral cognition in autism started to the premise that autistic people have a selective impairment in Theory of Mind (ToM; Moran et al., 2011), which is also a fundamental skill to understand the moral behaviours (e.g., Hamlin, 2015). However, the literature is far to show the role of Theory of Mind in the moral processing. Recently, it was suggested that ToM is a cognitive skill that involves both explicit and implicit processes (e.g., Southgate et al., 2007). The born of new implicit measures to assess the ToM brought an initial enthusiasm in this area of study. For instance, studies on clinical psychology, using both explicit and implicit ToM measures in order to understand selective ToM difficulties by autistic individuals without intellectual disability showed that, although this population presented high performance to explicit ToM tasks, they showed lower performance in the newer implicit ToM tasks compared to neurotypical participants (e.g., Schuwerk et al., 2015; Senju et al., 2009). Late unfortunately, these interesting results were put into question by other studies, which argued against the reliability of these new implicit measures (Kulke et al., 2018b). Moreover, another important gap in implicit ToM literature was that, while previous models in developmental psychology and psychopathology have suggested a link between attachment and the development of ToM, the relationship between attachment and implicit ToM has been so far neglected. In this experiment, we assessed both implicit and explicit mental state attribution, by means of a new implicit ToM task, as well as some attachment dimensions, comparing a group of autistic participants, without intellectual disability, and a control group. Specifically, in this experiment it was investigated participants’ spontaneous anticipatory look in response to false beliefs tasks using the eye-tracking methodology (one of the most used implicit ToM paradigms in literature). This study aimed to investigate the Theory of Mind (ToM) at both explicit and implicit level (Southgate et al., 2007), investigating possible differences between neurotypical individuals and autistic people. Furthermore, in the same study it was also investigated the link between the participants’ attachment and the explicit and implicit ToM skills. Moral cognition is a complex object of study that should be investigated with a multi-dimensional approach. In the experiments described in this thesis it was proposed a combined methodology that allowed to gather both explicit and implicit cognitive and emotional mechanisms that stay at the root of the moral judgment. Thanks to this approach it was found that deliberate and involuntary processes did not present convergent responses in the moral cognition of participants. Indeed, self-reported emotions seem to show divergent responses compared to the spontaneous facial expressions and the cardiac response to moral violations. These results support extant literature that raises concerns about the intuitionist assumptions of the moral cognition based on the assessment of only explicit responses of participants (e.g., Gutierrez & Giner-Sorolla, 2007; Nosek, 2007). Furthermore, this thesis highlighted the importance of studying the moral cognition in people affected by the autism spectrum disorder. Despite the social impairments that this neurodevelopmental disorder presents, we found that autistic people with cognitive level in average with the typical population, did not show any differences compared to the control group in both explicit and implicit mechanisms of moral cognition. These interesting findings may bring important theoretical reflections in moral and clinical psychology.

Today more and more algorithms and their applications are entering into the everyday life of each of us. Algorithms can help people to make more effective choices through historical data analysis, generating predictions to present to the user in the form of advice and suggestions. Given the increasing popularity of these suggestions, a greater understanding of how people could increase their judgment through the suggestions presented is needed, in order to improve the interface design of these applications. Since the envision of Artificial Intelligence (AI), technical progress has the intent of surpassing human performance and abilities (Crandall et al., 2018). Less consideration has been given to improve cooperative relationships between human agents and computer agents during decision tasks. No study up to date has investigated the negative emotions that could arise from a bad outcome after following the suggestion given by an intelligent system, and how to cope with the potential distrust that could affect the long-term use of the system. According to Zeelenberg et al. (Martinez & Zeelenberg, 2015; Martinez, Zeelenberg, & Rijsman, 2011a; Zeelenberg & Pieters, 1999), there are two emotions strongly related to wrong decisions, regret, and disappointment. The objective of this research is to understand the different effects of disappointment and regret on participants’ behavioral responses to failed suggestions given by algorithm-based systems. The research investigates how people deal with a computer suggestion that brings to a not satisfying result, compared to a human suggestion. To achieve this purpose, three different scenarios were tested in three different experiments. In the first experiment, the comparison was amongst two wrong suggestions in a between-subjects design through the presentation of a flight ticket scenario with two tasks. The first study analyzed exploratory models that explain the involvement of the source of suggestion and the trust in the systems in the experience of counterfactual emotions and responsibility attribution. The second experiment takes advantage of a typical purchase scenario, already used in the psychological literature, which had the aim to solve the issues found in the first study and test the algorithm aversion paradigm through the lenses of a classic study of regret literature. Results showed that, contrary to early predictions, people blame more the source of the suggestion when it comes from a human as compared with an intelligent computer suggestion. The third study had the aim to understand the role of counterfactuals through a paradigmatic experiment from algorithm aversion literature. In this study, the main finding is about the reliance people have on the algorithmic suggestion, which is higher compared to the reliance they have with a human suggestion. Nevertheless, people felt more guilt when they had a wrong outcome with a computer compared with a suggestion given by a person. Results are relevant in order to better understand how people decide and trust algorithm-based systems after a wrong outcome. This thesis is the first attempt to understand this algorithm aversion from the experienced counterfactual emotions and their different behavioral consequences. However, some of these findings showed contradictory results in the three experiments; this could be due to the different scenarios and participants’ thoughts and perceptions of artificial intelligence-based systems. From this work, three suggestions can be inferred to help designers of intelligent systems. The first regards the effective involvement of counterfactuals during the user interaction with a wrong outcome and the potential behavioral consequences that could affect the future use of the intelligent system. The second suggestion is the contribution to the importance of the context in which decisions are made, and the third guideline suggests the designer rethink about anthropomorphism as the best practice to present suggestions in the occurrence of potential wrong outcomes. Future works will investigate, in a more detailed way the perceptions of users and test different scenarios and decision domains.

Human beings must constantly adapt to an uncertain and mutable world by generating efficient behavioral strategies to pursue their goals. The complexity of this task increases in interactive contexts, where the outcomes of our actions depend also on the choices of other agents. When the environment does not provide reliable feedback, the effectiveness of behavioral strategies rests on the ability to handle available knowledge: agents have indeed to extract relevant information from noisy signals and build an exhaustive representation of the set of potential actions and outcomes available to themselves and to others. Individual differences in the implementation of these information- processing operations may underlie behavioral heterogeneity in several judgment and decision making tasks. Here we report three eye-tracking studies revealing the existence of distinct information-processing strategies in different individuals. Study 1 explores inter-individual differences in the generation of relational representations of interdependent contingencies. In Study 2 and Study 3, we move towards social contexts to investigate the mechanisms of strategy generation underlying strategic behavior in interaction. Our findings indicate that gaze data can disclose individual differences in the process of spontaneous strategy generation in both individual and interacting settings. We also report results suggesting that the emergence of unsophisticated information-processing strategies is associated with cognitive style. Moreover, we show that the attentional mechanisms sustaining the generation of unsophisticated strategies can be reconsidered and updated under the impact of endogenous and exogenous cues revealing the existence of alternative information-processing behaviors.

As economic inequality constantly grows, understanding what drives individuals’ support for redistribution is as critical as ever. In the current dissertation, we find evidence suggesting that attitudes towards reducing economic inequality can be experienced with moral conviction (i.e., perceived as rooted in one’s core beliefs about right and wrong). This, in turn, can motivate support for redistribution. In Study 1, reducing economic inequality moral conviction scores were comparable to other highly moralized topics (e.g., euthanasia), and higher than lowly moralized topics (e.g., tattoos). In Studies 2 and 3, a greater moral conviction for reducing economic inequality (family wealth and family income, respectively) positively predicted support for redistributive government policies (such as minimum wages and tax breaks increases) – also when controlling for income, subjective socio-economic inequality and economic system justification (i.e., other critical predictors of support for redistribution). Furthermore, this relationship was mediated by empathic concern (with mixed results) and structural causal attributions. Finally, Study 4 showed how moral conviction predicted a positive evaluation of poverty reduction program – even in the face of negative evidence (i.e., description of a fictitious family misusing their welfare bonuses). Moreover, moral conviction worked as a predictor of family evaluation when positive cases were shown. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of one’s moral conviction as a motivator of support for redistributive policies - suggesting that future research should take into account addressing not only implications concerning cost and benefits, but individuals’ personal moral considerations as well.

Social attitude is the approach of a person displayed towards other individuals or groups. Social attitude comprehensively affects the way we perceive, behave in, and interact with, the surrounding world; it is simply not possible to understand complex social behaviour such as strategic thinking without first knowing the attitude of the parties involved. Several disciplines contribute to the complex study of social attitude (social preferences in economics, social value orientation in psychology), but only recently have these disciplines started to communicate and develop comprehensive definitions and models. In particular, the current research debate focuses on pinpointing the nature of social attitude (e.g., what its defining components are), the factors that influence it (e.g. context, other individuals), as well as its consequences (e.g., its relevance for self-image representation). This thesis aims to answer to some of the open questions in the literature by testing and comparing the proposed competing explanations. The studies presented are based on a series of behavioural experiments coupled with established but also newly developed measurement tools concerning social norms and personal preferences. In addition, we try to uncover the mental processes underlying decisions with the help of computational models. The thesis is structured as follows. In Chapter 1, We outline a brief summary of the theories on social attitude from the economic and psychological literature, and describe the main tasks and models employed in the thesis. Chapter 2 explores how social attitude is influenced by others’ behaviour. We conduct a systematic comparison of the possible mechanisms driving attitude conformity using various experimental conditions, computational models, and control tasks (e.g., norm elicitation). We find that participants conform due to both peer influence (by learning from others about how salient a norm is) and compliance to authority (i.e. experimenter demand effects). Chapter 3 studies the effect of context in a task eliciting social attitude. We specifically test the effect of unavailable choices, that we call ”meta-context”, on participant’s decisions. We find that participants’ concerns about social norms, as well as their choices, depend on the currently available options, but also on meta-context. In Chapter 4, we study whether individuals tend to selectively forget about their morally questionable choices, and information related to it, such as the context in which the choice was made. We find that participants recollect less correctly selfish or anti-social choices compared to pro-social ones, but we find no memory bias concerning the context of the choice. Moreover, we uncover some potential evidence of a second memory bias related to choice frequency: people are generally more pro-social than antisocial, which means antisocial choices are more rare and thus more difficult to remember correctly. Finally, in chapter 5 We summarise the main findings of the thesis and present some conclusions. We try to integrate the various results to propose an empirically-informed model of social attitude to be applied in future research on the topic.

Mother child relationship is the first and the most important social relationship as it has implications on psychological and neural development of the individual. Here we investigated mother child relationship focusing on different aspects and using a combination of behavioural and neuroimaging techniques. In the first study we addressed the association between brain connectivity and interpersonal competences which are at the basis of every social interaction including the ones involved in mother-child relationship. Several studies suggests that higher White Matter (WM) integrity - an index of increased brain connectivity - , is associated with better cognition and behavioural performance. To test the hypothesis that higher WM integrity is associated with higher interpersonal competence we used Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI), a neuroimaging technique which allows to study in vivo the anatomy of boundless of axons conveying information in the brain. Then we correlated this information with a self-reported measure of interpersonal competences: the Adolescent Interpersonal Competence Questionnaire (AICQ). Results indicate that Interpersonal competence is associate with higher WM integrity in several major tracts of the right hemisphere, in specific the uncinate fasciculus, the cingulum, the forceps minor, the infero-fronto occipital fasciculus, the inferior longitudinal fasciculus, and the superior longitudinal fasciculus. These results provide the first direct analysis of the neuroanatomical basis of interpersonal competencies and young adult self-reported skills in social contexts. In the second work we used the same paradigm to test one of the main assumption of the attachment theory which states that social skills highly depends on the quality of attachment relationship. Results show higher integrity in four white matter association fibers in the left hemisphere: Uncinate Fasciculus, Cingulum, Superior Longitudinal Fasciculus and Inferior Fronto Occipital Fasciculus. This result supports the idea that the quality of the attachment relationship influences the emotional and social life of the individual from childhood to adulthood. Furthermore, the research represents an explorative approach to the study of mother-child relationship in healthy population, demonstrating the feasibility of using neuroimaging tools coupled with clinical investigations. Together those studies show that efficient structural connectivity is linked with secure attachment, improved social cognition and cognitive ability. Similarities and differences emerged in these studies will be discussed at the end of Chapter 3 in particular regarding left and right hemisphere specialization. In the second part of the thesis we switched the focus on parenting behaviour. Evidence from the literature suggest an association between Axonal Integrity measured with FA and functional connectivity measured with TMS in two region involved in preparing ad executing actions: premotor and motor cortex. Moreover neuroimaging reveals that infant cries activate parts of the premotor cortical system. In line with this evidence we linked parenting and brain functional connectivity conducting a study on motor cortex excitability in response of infant cries. We used event-related transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to investigated the presence and the time course of modulation of motor cortex excitability in young adults who listened to infant cries. TMS was delivered from 0 to 250 ms from sound onset in six steps of 50 ms in 10 females and 10 males. Motor Evoked Potentials (MEPs) were recorded from the biceps brachii (BB) and interosseus dorsalis primus (ID1) muscles. Results indicate an excitatory modulation of MEPs at 100 ms from the onset of the infant cry specific to females and to the ID1 muscle. This modulation is considered as automatic response to natural cry as it was not present in response of control sounds and the effect is found at 100-ms latency which make this modulation not compatible with a voluntary reaction to the stimulus but suggests an automatic, bottom-up audiomotor association. These results indicate that the brains of adult females appear to be tuned to respond to infant cries with automatic motor excitation. This effect may reflect the greater and longstanding burden on females in caregiving infants. The second part of the thesis continue with a study addressing the natural condition in which baby cries arise when the parent is not attending for infant stimulation. In this study we investigated how infant crying, compared to control sounds, captures adults’ attentive resources. Participants were all nulliparous women and men, we investigated the effects of different sounds on cerebral activation of the default mode network (DMN) while listeners engaged in two different kind of tasks: one designed to activate the DMN ( self-referential decision task) and one designed to deactivate the DMN (syllabic counting tasks). We found a strong deactivation of DMN in woman during baby cry which suggest a shift of attention from self-referential thinking toward the baby cry stimuli. In men we found instead a weaker deactivation of DMN during woman cry while their attention was directed toward an external task and simultaneously a sudden woman crying arise. Gender differences found in our studies and in the literature will be discussed. In the third part of the thesis we investigated the ability to discriminate synchrony and asynchrony during interaction between mother and child with typical or atypical development. We tested two kind of population: in the first study we compared parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to parents of children with Typical Development (TD). In the second study we used the Autistic Quotient questionnaire to divide the sample in two groups according with their autistic traits. The relevance of this task is due to the extreme importance to promptly individuate cues of abnormal social behavior in those cases in which the child might shows deficit in the social development. We hypothesized that individual related with a child with ASD or an individual with high autistic traits, might show similar social difficulties as the individual with ASD finding more challenging to detect cue of appropriate or unappropriated social behavior. To test this hypothesis we asked parents of children with ASD and parents of children with TD to judge video of interactions between mothers and child with ASD and mothers and child with TD. Each video were 20s long and depicted either a synchrony or asynchrony interaction, as categorized by an expert clinician. Contrary to our initial hypothesis results indicate that parents of children with ASD are as accurate as parents of children with TD in discriminating synchrony and asynchrony interaction with ASD, however they are less accurate than parents of children with TD in judging interaction with TD. In the second study by testing individual with higher autistic traits (HAQ group) versus lower autistic traits (LAQ group) we confirmed this trend. Using the same paradigm we found that both groups were less accurate during asynchrony interaction. However HAQ was more accurate in judging synchrony interaction with ASD while LAQ was more accurate in judging synchrony interaction with TD. This result indicate a facilitation effects in understanding interaction which include people that share similar characteristic with the observer disconfirming the hypothesis that people with higher autistic traits would have more difficulties in understanding social interactions and pointing the attention on other factors which might contribute during this process. A discussion on the need of further investigation using neuroimaging techniques to understand similarities and differences on neural processing of social interactions is provided at the end of Chapter 4.