Received: 9 May 2020 Revised: 13 October 2020 Accepted: 14 October 2020

DOI: 10.1111/mila.12356

SUBMITTED ARTICLE

Self-consciousness in autism: A third-person

perspective on the self

Sarah Arnaud

Department of Philosophy, Université du

Québec à Montréal, Montreal, Quebec, This paper suggests that autistic people relate to
Canada themselves via a third-person perspective, an objective

Correspondence
Sarah Arnaud, Department of
Philosophy, Université du Québec à
Montréal, Case postale 8888, succursale
Centre-ville, Montréal, Québec, Canada
H3C 3P8, Canada.
Email: sarah.audrey.arnaud@gmail.com
and explicit mode of access, while neurotypical people
tend to access the different dimensions of their self
through a first-person perspective. This approach sheds
light on autistic traits involving interactions with
others, usage of narratives, sensitivity and inter-
oception, and emotional consciousness. Autistic people
seem to access these dimensions through compara-
tively indirect and effortful processes, while neuro-
typical development enables a more intuitive sense
of self.

KEYWORDS
autism, emotions, interoception, narrative self, self-
consciousness, social interactions

1 | INTRODUCTION

Autism is a neurological condition with a prevalence of more than 1.5% (Lyall et al., 2017;
Zablotsky, Black, Maenner, Schieve & Blumberg, 2015). It is widely considered a heterogeneous
spectrum, encompassing different types, degrees, and manifestations. These manifestations,
traits, or particularities1 are clinically grouped into two main clusters: difficulties in social com-
munication and social interactions, and restricted or repetitive behaviors and interests
(American Psychiatric Association, 2013).
The high prevalence and heterogeneity of autism have led researchers to propose a “frac-
tionation” of the clusters rather than a broad “autistic phenotype” (Brunsdon & Happé, 2014). I
follow this approach in this paper which focuses on self-consciousness.

1
I will use these terms instead of the words “symptoms” or “deficits,” which have a negative connotation.

Mind & Language. 2020;1–17. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/mila © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1
2 ARNAUD

The most widely discussed particularity in autism is a disrupted theory of mind (ToM). This
is usually described as a deficit in relating to other people's mental states. It may extend to intui-
tive unawareness of their own mental states, though such knowledge may be acquired with
conscious effort and training (Frith & Happé, 1999). While the idea of a specific deficit of ToM
in autism has been contested (Iao & Leekam, 2014), the particularities in self-consciousness
continue to be well documented. Recent attempts to theorize about the self in autism have pro-
posed various descriptions of dimensions of the self and self-consciousness, and indicate that a
more coherent explanation is required (Perrykkad & Hohwy, 2020).
My aim is to show how differences in self-consciousness distinguish autistic and neuro-
typical development. More precisely, several studies show that, in autism, the self is
accessed with an objective, explicit, third-person perspective. The goal of this paper is to
bring together some empirical literature on this topic and to establish the correspondence
between these reports and a theoretical framework on self-consciousness. Given the abun-
dance of studies, this paper primarily focuses on providing a coherent approach to self-
consciousness that systematizes prominent themes in the literature. Some alternative expla-
nations are also discussed. While I refer to “autistic people” throughout the paper, not all
the proposals in this paper may apply to all autistic individuals, since autism is not a
homogeneous category.
In Section 2, I consider a conceptual distinction between the self and self-consciousness.
I propose a theoretical framework encompassing four dimensions of the self, their
corresponding mechanisms of introspection, and the components that shape them. Such
structuring is not the only relevant one, and other dimensions have been, and may yet be,
formulated. My justification of this framework remains compatible with this possibility. In
Section 3, I integrate a distinction between first-person and third-person perspectives on
self-consciousness into that framework. This distinction will be relevant for understanding
the particularities of the self in autism. These particularities are presented in Section 4,
which integrates studies on the self and self-consciousness in autism to the aforementioned
framework. My goal is to show that many ostensibly independent lines of research all point
to a common end: People with autism relate to themselves from a third-person perspective;
that is, they represent themselves in a more objective and explicit way than neurotypical
people. The evidence marshaled here is considerable, but often indirect. I hope to provide a
powerful circumstantial case to motivate future work, including some directions for empiri-
cal research.

2 | C O N S C IO U S N ES S A N D S E LF- C O N S C I O U S N E S S : A
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

For decades, researchers have highlighted idiosyncrasies of the self in autism. The word
“autism” comes from the Greek root autos (“self”), and was first used in 1910 to describe poor
adaptation to external reality as a symptom of schizophrenia (Maatz, Hoff & Angst, 2015).
Kanner described a syndrome characterized by a withdrawal from the social world, or in his
words, by innate “disturbances of affective contact” (Kanner, 1943). At that time, because autis-
tic people did not seem to communicate, they were considered to be self-absorbed.
Descriptions of the self in autism have evolved considerably in the last decade; autistic peo-
ple are no longer considered unable to empathize (Brewer & Murphy, 2016), and the presence
of feelings and communication skills is now undisputed. However, the question of self-
ARNAUD 3

consciousness and its components is still unresolved. While the terms “self” and “self-con-
sciousness” are widely used in discussions of autism, they rarely capture the whole concept,
and may lack clarification (Zahavi, 2010, p. 547).

2.1 | Distinguishing the self from self-consciousness

The self can be distinguished from self-consciousness by differentiating the experiential dimen-
sions of the self, which refer to one's own subjective experiences of the world; and a representa-
tion of the self which refers to one's own experiences of these dimensions of the self. According
to Dehaene (2014), the self designates our relationship with the world from our point of view,
and self-consciousness, the awareness of oneself. Thus, the experiential self is “‘I' that looks at
its surroundings from a specific vantage point,” whereas consciousness of the self is “‘I' [that]
can look down at itself [and] comment on its own performance” (p. 9).
The notion of “self” in “self-consciousness” does not necessarily encompass the totality of
one's identity. On Dehaene's view, the relevant notion of the self is the result of one's interac-
tions with the world, following Prinz's interpretation of Wittgenstein (Prinz, 2011), according to
which there is no such thing as a “phenomenal I", a self as subject beyond the content of its
experiences and interactions with the world. It is also compatible with Zahavi's idea that “one
does not seem to conceive of the self as something standing apart from, or above experiences”
(Zahavi, 2008, p. 125). The self can thus be understood as the result of one's subjective experi-
ences of the world. Through self-consciousness, some dimensions of the self as a target become
conscious. Becoming aware of my sensory self, for example, means becoming aware of my reac-
tions to some sensory stimuli.
On this view, the phenomenal self is about one's interactions with the environment, or
about self-consciousness. Before considering this, I describe four dimensions of the self. These
dimensions have been widely discussed both in neurotypical development and in autism. All
require interactions with the environment. One's identity depends on how one interprets sur-
rounding stimuli, by interacting with them and behaving towards them. The environment offers
a set of affordances or potential actions (Pezzulo & Cisek, 2016). Each of these dimensions of
the self can become conscious through introspection, which can be decomposed into different
mechanisms.

2.2 | Four dimensions of the self and mechanisms of introspection

The four main dimensions or types of subjective experience that can shape one's notion of who
one is—one's identity—are indicated in Table 1 (left column). These dimensions can become
the object of consciousness on introspection. Different mechanisms of introspection have been
described for each dimension of the self (Table 1, middle column).
Finally, these dimensions are shaped by specific components (Table 1, right column). As we
will see, these components can sometimes be conscious too, even though they do not need to be
in order to shape one's identity.
The first dimension is that of the interpersonal self (Table 1, top left), a concept borrowed
from Zahavi (2010). It is the result of one's social interactions with other people, as well as one's
ability to relate to other people. This dimension encompasses basic ways of differentiating one-
self from others, such as the use of one's name and personal pronouns, and more complex
4 ARNAUD

T A B L E 1 The dimensions of the self and self-consciousness

Note: The left column represents the different dimensions of the self. The middle column represents the processes by which one
can become consciously aware of oneself. Self-consciousness can be triggered directly, and one has a first-person perspective on
oneself (this pathway is represented by the plain arrows). The right column shows the different elements that shape the
dimensions of the self. In order to shape one's sensory self (left column), one has to be exposed to sensory stimuli (right
column). These components can become conscious and trigger self-consciousness; in these cases, one has a third-person
perspective (represented by the dotted arrows) on oneself. In these cases, self-consciousness is the result of a reflective process,
mediated by a consciousness of external cues.

characteristics attributed to oneself, such as the way one appears to others, or one's personality
traits related to one's behaviors towards others, such as introversion or extraversion, empathic
or selfish personality, openness to others and propensity to help.
For such a dimension of the self to be present, one's own self has to be considered in relation
to others' self. This “relatedness” (Table 1, top middle), a concept used by Hobson (2010), gives
a sense of others as “being like me” and the ability to distinguish oneself from them
(Oberman & Ramachandran, 2007). It emerges from a set of simulation mechanisms, such as
imitational abilities that are at the root of social interactions (Decety & Chaminade, 2003),
which allow one to navigate the social world (see Table 1, top right). It also provides a mecha-
nism for boundaries between one's own self and others, namely a self–other differentiation at a
spatial or bodily level (Noel, Cascio, Wallace & Park, 2017), and cognitively (Sowden &
Shah, 2014).
Being conscious of one's interpersonal self is being conscious of such self–other relatedness,
where one can identify with others, to a certain degree, and refer to oneself with attributes that
distinguish oneself from others (with pronouns and names, for example). Because it is built
through the perception and interactions with other people, the interpersonal self will depend
on others' social behaviors as affordances for the individual.
The second dimension is a temporal or narrative self, which builds identity through self-
attribution of various characteristics and events past and future. It is constituted by the prefer-
ences, beliefs, desires, and personality traits of individuals across time. It can, “link past, present
and future events into a meaningful whole” (Zahavi, 2010, p. 550). Events that occur at different
times shape our goals, desires, preferences, and core beliefs, and give one's life a meaning
through time (Schechtman, 2011). As such, the narrative self can deliver a sense of agency over
time. Generally, the sense of agency refers to a present self, but when it involves prospective
and retrospective cues about one's own actions, agency is temporal (Zalla & Sperduti, 2015).
ARNAUD 5

This dimension relies on episodic memory and episodic future thinking—corresponding to

the ability to represent one's past experiences, and to build projections of future events (Lind,
Williams, Bowler & Peel, 2014), and on counterfactual reasoning (Özbek, Bohn &
Berntsen, 2017). One can access this dimension by locating oneself in these experiences (Table 1,
middle column), constituted by one's past and future actions (right column).
The third dimension is a sensory or bodily dimension, which designates one's own bodily
postures, movements and sensations. It results from one's interactions with sensory stimuli
(Table 1, right column). Predictive coding approaches suggest the brain generates models of the
sources of sensory stimulation by comparing actual sensory inputs with its predictions. Accord-
ingly, this dimension of self can underpin sensory experience, and can be accessed, consciously,
by “abstracting” it from sensory stimulation (Perrykkad & Hohwy, 2020). This process of inter-
oception (Table 1, middle column), allows access to one's own bodily sensations, or feelings of
the body (Craig, 2015).
The last dimension is the emotional self, or how one affectively feels toward the surrounding
world, other people, and situations. Emotions are episodic, and transient. However, one's iden-
tity is constituted in part by one's propensity to feel certain types of emotions more than others,
or with more intensity than others, or to be confronted by some types of objects and environ-
ments that elicit certain emotions more than others. In this sense, individuals can be said to
have emotional lives or selves that are part of their personalities. If one constantly perceives the
world as being dangerous (Table 1, right column), one's personality can partly be defined as
fearful. In order to become conscious of this dimension of the self, awareness of one's own affect
is required. This process can minimally be understood as access to one's own emotional feelings
(middle column).
These dimensions could be divided or grouped differently. The literature on the self encom-
passes numerous relevant taxonomies that have the potential to offer interesting alternative cat-
egorizations, some of which are considered below.
First, one could consider an alternative model to the interpersonal self in which learned
knowledge about oneself, such as one's name, or the interactional behaviors through which one
can recognize oneself, constitute a further dimension of the self: a “cognitive” or “self-referen-
tial” self.2 While this may be a useful conceptualization, a broader one, as I propose for the
interpersonal self, may account for more aspects of self-components described in the literature.
Interpersonal self-reference traits can include: being nice, empathic or selfish, which concern
our relationship with others; one's given name is someone else's decision used to distinguish
one from others. But other personal characteristics can relate to the temporal self in some con-
texts: recognizing oneself as being clumsy or audacious can be the result of recollecting past
events or considering one's future plans. And some of these traits concern one's emotional self
when they are affective and recurrent enough to be part of one's personality (like being fearful
or resentful). Finally, self-reference can refer to the sensory self when it comes to recognizing
oneself in the mirror or one's own face (i.e., “bodily ownership,” Perrykkad &
Hohwy, 2020, p. 9).
Secondly, concerning the temporal self, Lind et al. (2014) report the views of some authors
who propose that the “self-projection” mechanism that allows one to represent oneself through
time, also underlies ToM abilities by allowing one to simulate others' mental states through
one's own perspective. This suggests a potential strong link between the temporal and the inter-
personal selves. The temporal self could also be theorized as partly sensory because it

2
I am grateful to both Reviewers for their suggestions on this subject.
6 ARNAUD

corresponds to a model in space and time: Predictive coding theories propose that models of
our environment are built by constantly predicting the causes of our sensory inputs. In this per-
spective, any dimension of the self could ultimately be reduced to the way one processes sen-
sory inputs.
Finally, the social and emotional aspects of the self are sometimes described as a single
social–emotional dimension (Seth, 2013; South & Rodgers, 2017). Emotional consciousness in
autism is generally explored in studies on interpersonal self-consciousness because recognizing
other people's emotions shows differences from the neurotypical in autism (Griffiths
et al., 2017). These studies sometimes address interoception, because physiological modifica-
tions are a necessary component of emotions.
The four-part dimensional model I propose here is, therefore, a pragmatic one, meant to sys-
temize the literature and shed light on the self in autism, rather than an attempt to capture nat-
ural kinds, although interactions between these dimensions are discussed throughout the
paper.

3 | S E LF - CO NS CI OU S N E S S : F I R S T - P E R S ON AN D
THIRD-PERSON PERSPECTIVES

The distinction between a first-person and a third-person perspective on oneself can shed light
on the question of self-consciousness and its components in autism.
Distinguishing between first-person and third-person perspectives about consciousness often
reflects distinct and different methodologies in the understanding of consciousness. Indeed, the
first-person perspective is the standard method for phenomenologists to understand conscious-
ness since Descartes: It relies on introspection, where the subject inspects their own mental
states (Dennett, 1991, Ch. 4). In contrast, the third-person perspective is the observer-
experimental perspective for the study of consciousness. Through this perspective, knowledge
about consciousness relies on observation and scientific methods. Zahavi uses a similar
terminology about self-consciousness: He distinguishes a first-person perspective from a “third-
person self-reference” (2008). But how can this distinction be applied to self-consciousness if
self-consciousness designates introspection?
Choifer (2018) suggests that the notion of first-person perspective encompasses two distinct
concepts. The first one designates the “what-it-is-like,” this direct acquaintance with our experi-
ences, whereas the second one designates introspection and its epistemic role. Following Met-
zinger's distinction between first-person and third-person self-knowledge (Metzinger, 1995), she
calls the first one a first-person perspective, and the second one a third-person perspective.
Consciousness of oneself through a first-person perspective implies that we directly and
immediately relate to a dimension of the self, noticing it through the experience. The first-
person perspective corresponds to that impression of direct, unmediated access. Becoming
conscious of one's sensory self by a first-person perspective is relating to one's sensory self by
interoception, without any inferential process. One can notice that one is warm or hungry, by
having a direct feeling of warmth or hunger, without noticing any of the sensory stimuli behind
it (a change of temperature, or the need for food). Similarly, when emotional consciousness
emerges from this first-person perspective, one is directly conscious of the feeling associated
with anger, sadness or happiness without necessarily being conscious of what triggered it.
In this sense, this route to self-consciousness can be said to be subjective, because one
relates to one's feelings from one's own point of view. This first-person perspective corresponds
ARNAUD 7

to Zahavi's description of, “having first-personal access to one's own experiential life”
(Zahavi, 2008, p. 12) (Table 1, solid arrow).
The third-person perspective, by contrast, is a reflective process that can be detached from
the experience. It leads one to:

reflect deliberately on things, independently of whether this reflection is expressed

as an introspective assertion or in the terms of a statement referring to an “exter-
nal” fact. (Choifer, 2018, p. 360).

It corresponds to Zahavi's (2008) third-person perspective on the self, a “third-person self-

reference” (p. 25). He explains:

[W]hen I refer to myself from the third-person perspective, I am referring to myself

in exactly the same way that I can refer to others, and that others can refer to me
(the only difference being that I am the one doing it, thus making the reference
into a self-reference). (Zahavi, 2008, p. 27).

When becoming conscious of oneself through a third-person perspective, observable cues

can drive the process. So, for instance, a third-person perspective on the interpersonal self will
correspond to access to self-other relatedness triggered by an awareness of some observable
components. These components might be my reactions towards other people, the way they
behave towards me, my ways of interacting with them, or any observable cues about my social
interactions that can give me a sense of how I am, while relating to others. Having a third-
person perspective on the sensory self implies accessing objective cues prior to interoception.
One will not only have a feeling of being warm or hungry, but will notice something observable
in order to feel warm or hungry, such as one's bodily or sensory reactions to a change of tem-
perature or a need for food. This third-person perspective is represented by the dotted arrows in
Table 1. Thus, one can have a sense of one's interpersonal self through a direct impression of
self-other relatedness (this is a first-person perspective), or by referring to oneself as one refers
to others: by observing one's own behaviors and reactions (a third-person perspective).3
In the next section, I develop the hypothesis according to which, while neurotypical people
tend to relate to themselves through a first-person perspective, or subjectively, autistic people
tend to have a third-person perspective on themselves, using empirical data on the different
dimensions of the self in autism.

4 | THE SELF A ND SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN AUTISM

Autistic people report knowing themselves less and having fewer insights about their own lives
than close others, who, according to them, have a better access and understanding about them
(Schriber, Robins & Solomon, 2014). They do not consider themselves as their own best refer-
ence; their first-person perspective on themselves is not epistemically better than an external

3
I suspect that some authors, notably Carruthers and Dennett, would reject this distinction by asserting that we always
access ourselves in a third-person way. I do not address this view here as it is a minority one, but my discussion on
autism provides a further reason to follow the majority view, according to which the distinction between first- and
third-person perspectives is real.
8 ARNAUD

one. By contrast, neurotypical people consider themselves as the experts about their own self,
and close others as knowing less about them than they do (Vazire, 2010). Without considering
the first-person perspective to be particularly accurate or epistemically helpful, one might con-
sistently look for objective cues, instead of relying on subjective knowledge to get access to one-
self. If this is the case, one would favor a third-person perspective over a first-person one. This
may be happening in autism, for each dimension of the self (although, possibly, to a variable
extent, following the heterogeneity of the autism spectrum as currently conceived). While dif-
ferent profiles are not explicitly distinguished here, it is important to keep in mind that findings
from studies on autism are rarely representative of all people on the spectrum.

4.1 | Interpersonal self

The interpersonal dimension of the self and its underlying processes have been extensively stud-
ied in autism. Autism is specifically characterized by social particularities (American Psychiatric
Association, 2013). The popular idea of a ToM deficit implied that autistic people have specific
difficulties in understanding other people's minds (Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith, 1985). Simula-
tion theories of ToM have also described and offered explanations of specific disrupted pro-
cesses in self-other relatedness in autism (Oberman & Ramachandran, 2007). Even alternative
theories to a ToM deficit suggest that the social lives of autistic people come from a disrupted
social and emotional “self” (Hobson, 1990). While the underlying explanations of autistic mani-
festations in the social domain are still unresolved, numerous studies show that they are not
only the result of particularities in understanding others, but that they might also be related to
the way autistic people relate to themselves while interacting.
Autism is often associated with a diminished self-bias—a diminished tendency to pro-
cess information about oneself prior to and more automatically than other types of informa-
tion (Burrows, Usher, Mundy & Henderson, 2017). Moreover, infants later diagnosed as
autistic show reduced responses to their own names compared to neurotypical ones
(Nijhof & Bird, 2019). A decreased use of “me” and “I” pronouns has long been reported:
The ability to refer to oneself through personal over third-person pronouns comes late in
the development of autistic people (Perrykkad & Hohwy, 2020). Autism is also associated
with a diminished social salience that is at the source of interpersonal particularities
(Arnaud, 2020a). Taken together, these results indicate that consciousness of the self in rela-
tion to others is no more salient than any other type of information for autistic people. This
could suggest a third-person perspective on one's interpersonal self: regarding oneself
towards others as one would relate to another towards others. That would explain that “I”
and “She” are not intuitively different, and that one's own name is not salient and preferred
over other information.
However, some results appear to contradict this interpretation. In a task requiring learning
associations of (abstract) shapes with labels “me,” “mother,” or “other,” adults with autism per-
formed like neurotypical adults in showing a self-bias (Williams, Nicholson & Grainger, 2018),
suggesting first-person self-orientation. This null result in adults may reflect a different develop-
mental trajectory in neurotypical and autistic people (Nijhof & Bird, 2019). A third-person per-
spective on the self may build a sense of self that becomes more salient through time and
eventually develops a self-bias. The difference in performance between child and adult is well
aligned with the one between the automaticity of biases and the complexity of learned strategies
that require more time, reasoning and cognitive effort (Evans & Stanovich, 2013). It remains
ARNAUD 9

compatible with the idea of a third-person perspective. Studies that consider the distinction
between self and other also point in this direction.
Hobson and Meyer (2005) asked children to show a communication partner where on her
body she should place her sticker-badge. The autistic child tended to point at the other person's
body, whereas non-autistic children pointed at a part of their own body, mirroring the commu-
nication partner. Though both methods are effective, autistic children tend to focus on the other
person in a social interaction, rather than thinking of themselves as they relate to someone else.
The authors explain that: “[A]t times, children with autism may communicate in accordance
with a third-person stance, rather than a first- vis-à-vis second-person perspective” (Hobson &
Meyer, 2005, p. 488). This difference has also been shown in body awareness. Noel et al. (2017)
suggest that the distinction between oneself and others can be seen as a continuum, ranging
from a very imprecise self-others' boundary to an excessive self-others' boundary. They propose
that autistic people have an excessive and inflexible demarcation between themselves and
others: “ASD may represent a particular instance in which the distinction between self and
other is exceptionally strong” (Noel et al., 2017, p. 7).
The authors report the results from a rubber hand experiment by Cascio, Foss-Feig,
Burnette, Heacock and Cosby (2012). Participants are presented with a fake rubber hand placed
next to their real hand. The rubber hand is visible while the real hand is hidden. The experi-
menter is seen to touch the rubber hand, while simultaneously touching the (unseen) actual
hand. After 3 min of stimulation, neurotypical people feel that the rubber hand is theirs. Autis-
tic people have this impression only after 6 min of stimulation. The authors conclude that autis-
tic people overestimate the division between their own body and others' body: this strong
feeling of separation between oneself and others preventing development of the illusion of
owning somebody else's hand.
However, similar findings showing diminished responses to observed actions that do not
match one's own experiences have been explained through a contrary interpretation, namely
that autistic people might have difficulties in distinguishing themselves from others
(Deschrijver, Wiersema & Brass, 2017). And a third alternative has been formulated in terms of
atypicality in “self-other control”: autistic difficulties in inhibiting and controlling both self and
other representations (Sowden & Shah, 2014). Despite their divergences, these studies all point
to an atypical distinction between oneself and others for autistic people. They seem to interact
with others and refer to themselves from “outsiders” point of view rather than from a simulated
perspective of others, making their sense of self-other relatedness more detached and external
than first-person oriented. What does this mean specifically for the interpersonal self? Com-
bined with the findings on self-reference previously mentioned, these results on self-other dis-
tinction confirm an atypical way to refer to one's interpersonal self in autism. Two divergent
explanations of this have been attempted.
Frith and de Vignemont (Frith & De Vignemont, 2005) distinguish between a naïve egocen-
tric perspective on oneself—a representation that comes from a “direct self-knowledge, which
one cannot have about anybody else” (p. 725)—and an allocentric one—a detached and abstract
knowledge of oneself that comes from a representation of “oneself as a person among others”
(p. 725). While neurotypical people can switch from one perspective to the other to readily
achieve an integrated “sense of self,” autistic people have difficulties. In other words, first-
person and third person self-consciousness may dissociate.
My explanation, however, assumes a more direct and intuitive sense of self–other related-
ness for neurotypical people, compared to autistic people who would have to explicitly relate to
their interactions with others in order to get this sense of self-other relatedness. If this is correct,
10 ARNAUD

it would correspond to a distinction between a first-person perspective on the interpersonal self

for neurotypicals and a third-person for autistic people. The advantage of this explanation is
that it accounts for the diminished self-bias in autistic infants and children, and for reduced
social salience in autism. Future studies may distinguish these stances empirically.

4.2 | Temporal/narrative self

Similar particularities characterize the temporal self. Lyons and Fitzgerald (2013) showed that
the sense of the narrative self in autistic people is relatively vague and unrepresentative of real-
ity. Similarly, Lind explains that they have specific difficulties with autobiographical memory
(Lind, 2010). Robinson, Howlin and Russell (2017) suggest that autistic people are able to recall
their own experiences to understand themselves, but that their autobiographical memories
seem “dissociated” from the self, as if they were talking about someone else. This corresponds
to a mediated perspective in accessing one's temporal self where one does not immediately refer
to one's own narrative, but needs to dissociate from oneself to access it (Lind &
Bowler, 2010, p. 896).
Lind and Bowler (2010) specifically suggest a tendency in autistic people to refer to past
events with an “observer” or a “third-person perspective” rather than a “field perspective” or a
“first-person perspective.” There is a tendency for autistic people to use external cues to refer to
themselves rather than internal cues like neurotypical people (Zalla & Sperduti, 2015). More
specifically, they show that a sense of agency in autism concerns a prospective sense of agency,
involving intentions and action selection. Some sense of agency with respect to one's actions
(like the goodness of the outcomes, or the comparison of the outcomes with the predicted out-
comes), is spared (and see Zalla, Miele, Leboyer & Metcalfe, 2015—conscious retrospective
judgments are spared). The difficulties with prospective sense of agency suggest difficulties with
references to one's internal self: one's mental states related to one's own planned actions. The
spared processes in retrospective sense of agency suggest the presence of self-consciousness
when referring to descriptive and objective cues about oneself. For autistic people, the temporal
self would not be the result of an intuitive mental representation of themselves in past or future
situations (Table 1, solid arrow from the memory of oneself to the temporal self), but would
rather be built through objective descriptions (dotted arrows, from objective cues to the memory
of oneself to the temporal self).
Lind et al. (2014) recently identified a mechanism that could explain the particularities of
projection in past and future events: Autistic peoples' difficulties with “scene construction”; the
ability to build a coherent and contextualized representation of a scene through different
modalities. Through scene construction, agency in time reflects intuitive access to coherent and
contextualized scenarios about themselves in neurotypical people, whereas autistic people
would find building such representations difficult because they do not integrate information
quickly into a coherent whole and have a tendency to see situations as more fragmented.
This idea echoes the suggestion from predictive coding theories according to which autistic
people consider the mismatches between their predictions and the actual environment (predic-
tion errors) inflexibly (Van de Cruys et al., 2014). This may lead to a focus on detail, compared
with neurotypical people who can process global information more quickly (if sometimes less
accurately) because they minimize prediction errors by making sensory input “fit” their model
of the world: they “meta-learn.” Applied to self-consciousness, Perrykkad and Hohwy (2020)
conclude that the way autistic people process information leads to prioritizing short-term
ARNAUD 11

minimization of prediction error, which results in a “less comprehensive and less substantive
long-term self-model” (p. 14). Autistic people may thus find it hard to generalize about them-
selves based on first-person experiences.
This difficulty of generalizing information has also been attributed to diminished abilities in
inhibiting irrelevant information (Adams & Jarrold, 2012), and to some enhanced perceptual
abilities (Mottron, Dawson, Soulieres, Hubert & Burack, 2006). These aspects of information
processing—notably in feature binding in perceptual processing—may reflect broader cognitive
particularities, and not be specific to the self. However, other studies report difficulties for autis-
tic people in counterfactual thinking about situations involving people, but not in situations
involving objects (Grant, Riggs & Boucher, 2004). Given the hypothesis of atypical “self–other
control” that posits difficulties with inhibitory control (see section on the interpersonal self),
particularities about temporal self-consciousness could share common underlying cause with
those concerning the interpersonal self.
These conclusions could further explain why autistic people only get a spared sense of their
temporal self when these relate to observational cues (such as action performances and results).
That retrospective judgments about the self may be relatively spared in autism is also attested
by the numerous autobiographies of autistic people, suggesting a third-person perspective on
their temporal self could compensate for the difficulties in building a temporal self through a
first-person access.4 Observational cues would allow them to acquire more details than neuro-
typical people in order to build a coherent scene in which one can consider oneself. This could
also explain how the self-reference effect (described in Section 4.1) changes over time for autis-
tic people. While they lack self-reference in childhood, it may be acquired by adulthood; acquir-
ing a sense of self through explicit learning, which implies more time and effort, but which may
then become an efficient way of referring to themselves.
To test these claims empirically, autistic and neurotypical people could be asked to compare
their past or future traits and actions with the present ones across events and situations
described by experimenters. To test episodic thinking, participants are generally asked to pro-
vide descriptions of past or future situations. But if the temporal self of autistic people is built
through a third-person perspective rather than a first-person one, their self-description will vary
depending of the level of details and contextualization that they have access to in some imag-
ined descriptions. This is why descriptions of situations should be provided to test episodic
thinking. The prediction would be that a detailed contextualized description of past or future
situations should provide the necessary observational and external cues (such as one's behavior
during the event, or one's apprehended or expected results of the performed action). That would
lead to richer and more accurate comparisons with one's past and future self in the autistic
group than when the events and situations are described with less details or context, where par-
ticipants have to rely on more internal cues to describe themselves (such as their feelings or
mental states at the time of the situation). Longitudinal studies could assess the potential
improvement of the sense of self through development, which would confirm the development
of a compensatory mechanism.

4
Note that Perrykkad and Hohwy consider on the contrary that what prevents autistic people to build a long-term
model of themselves is their propensity to rely on first-person experiences and have a self-representation that is less
secure and more labile. However, they recognize that this hypothesis leads to the counterintuitive conclusion that a less
robust sense of self relies more on specific experiences. Moreover, the idea of a changing sense of self in autism
contrasts with the one of inflexibility previously mentioned.
12 ARNAUD

4.3 | Sensory/bodily self

Particularities in the consciousness of the self in autism have also been found through senso-
rial and bodily manifestations. In this context, interoception, which designates the access to
one's bodily sensations, the “representation of internal feelings” (Craig, 2002, p. 662), is the
process by which one can become conscious of one's sensory self. This representation is gener-
ally implicit, meaning that one does not need to consciously attend to the interactions
between one's body and the surrounding environment in order to represent internal feelings
(activities such as yoga and meditation may foster a detached and explicit relation) (Farb
et al., 2015). This suggests a first-person perspective on one's own bodily self for neurotypical
people.
For autistic people, particularities concerning sensitivity have been described clinically and
in research. DSM-5 describes a characteristic of autism as “hyper- or hypo-reactivity to sensory
input or unusual interests in sensory aspects of the environment” (American Psychiatric
Association, 2013). Acute tactile sensitivity and a feeling of overwhelming sensations have been
reported (Gomot & Wicker, 2012). Others report an overreliance on bodily sensations rather
than visual cues for body ownership (Perrykkad & Hohwy, 2020). All this could seem to point
to an enhanced reliance on internal rather than external inputs to access one's sensory self.
However, rather than contradicting previous findings, the fact that sensations can be abundant
and overwhelming for autistic people may suggest external cues are not integrated effectively
with internal cues. Access to such cues may be especially difficult, given the abundance of sen-
sory stimuli to be constantly processed.
Autistic people are better than control groups at sustained attention to counting heartbeats
over longer trial intervals (Schauder, Mash, Bryant & Cascio, 2015), suggesting an enhanced
ability in autism to maintain attention over time. However, this is contested in other studies
that show reduced sustained attention in some autistic groups (Campbell et al., 2018). A better
explanation is that autistic people can access their inner states more accurately as long as they
have time to access signal change reflecting internal states.
Garfinkel et al. (2016) offer a useful clarification of interoceptive processes which is relevant
here. Interoceptive sensibility refers to reported tracking of one's own bodily changes, for exam-
ple one's own impression of heart rate. It is independent of interoceptive accuracy, judged by
objective standards (i.e., heart rate reports that correspond with actual heart rate, measured
directly). The metacognitive ability to match “external” accuracy measures to “internal” sensi-
bility reports, has been termed interoceptive awareness (Garfinkel et al., 2016). In people with
autism, high sensibility contributes to the reports of “overwhelming” sensory environmental
stimulation (Gomot & Wicker, 2012). The question then is, how might relatively greater reli-
ance on a third person perspective in autism address these disturbances in interoceptive sensi-
bility; disturbances that speak to reliance on a first-person perspective?
Anomalous interoceptive sensibility may be related to particularities in predictive coding
mechanisms that control the relation between interoceptive sensibility and interoceptive accu-
racy (Quattrocki & Friston, 2014). If someone is unable to integrate awareness of internal physi-
ological state with objective evidence of that state, hyper-interoception or hypo-interoception
may result.
Developmental studies suggest that interoceptive accuracy increases with age in autistic
people (Nicholson, Williams, Carpenter & Kallitsounaki, 2019). It may be possible to train an
autistic person to develop such interoceptive awareness by explicit instruction, showing the
relationship between their internal introspections and more explicit measures.
ARNAUD 13

4.4 | Emotional self

Emotions can be minimally understood as implying a set of physiological modifications in the

central and peripheral nervous system (Adolphs, 2017); some processes of categorization and
appraisal of the surrounding environment (Barrett, 2017; Scherer, 2019); and a phenomenology,
sometimes understood as a feeling, or a subjective component (Colombetti, 2014). When these
manifestations are felt or noticed, the emotion is said to be conscious (Prinz, 2006).
Several studies show that emotions are present in similar circumstances and manifest them-
selves similarly in autistic and neurotypical people physiologically (Ben Shalom et al., 2006). In
addition, autistic people can access their emotions consciously: For example, they can define
emotions and report examples from their personal lives in which a given emotion was felt
(Williams & Happe, 2010). They can become conscious of their emotional self.
However, numerous studies have shown differences in how autistic and neurotypical people
relate to their emotional selves. Some authors suggest that autistic people have difficulties in
“processing own emotions” (Hill, Berthoz, & Frith, 2004); others about “conscious feelings”
(Ben Shalom et al., 2006); or “emotional awareness,” which includes arousal, interoception,
and introspection (Silani et al., 2008); or particularities in the way autistic people can recognize
“emotions in self” (Williams & Happe, 2010); or in their “understanding [of] one's own emo-
tions” (Losh & Capps, 2006; Ben-Itzchak, Abutbul, Bela, Shai & Zachor, 2016). What is the
nature of these differences?
Autistic people seem to refer less to their personal experiences than neurotypicals, and more
to definitional elements to describe their emotions. Losh and Capps (2006) give the example of
an autistic child's description of shame as “doing something wrong” and possibly getting “in
trouble for it” (p. 814), while neurotypical children give examples of situations that have
shamed them in the past. The authors suggest that neurotypical people tend to use more subjec-
tive emotional elements, and refer directly to their own feelings to describe an emotion,
whereas autistic people refer to explicit elements, and use their knowledge of the emotion in
question to describe it. The consciousness of the emotional self is therefore mediated by access
to what causes or constitutes the state, like a moral value in this example about shame, or when
“tears started to come” (p. 814), or by describing the movements of the eyebrows for sadness. In
addition, autistic children need more prompting to describe their emotional experiences, which
is not the case for neurotypical children, who do it spontaneously.
A similar pattern seems to occur when asked to describe the causes of specific emotions. Neu-
rotypical people give “coherent” descriptions, whereas the autistic group gives significantly less
coherent and more “odd” responses, which the experimenter may not understand (Ben-Itzchak
et al., 2016). For example, to the question: “What kind of things make you feel happy and cheer-
ful?”, an autistic child answers, “the road of oranges”; to the question, “what makes you feel
frightened or anxious?”, another responds, “when the teacher moves his head”; and to a question
about sadness, another autistic child replies: “when my heart does not want to play, wants to
relax” (p. 2365). More than being “odd,” these responses seem to refer to objective elements: refer-
ences to external causes of happiness or fear, as well as descriptions of physiological changes to
explain sadness. Even when the felt physiological changes are described, the description is objec-
tive rather than self-centered, as if these changes were an external and autonomous entity.
In considering responses, Ben-Itzchak and colleagues also notice that autistic children give
responses categorized as “non-social situation” and “objects/animals” more than neurotypical
people, and responses categorized as “self-awareness” and “social situation” less often than neu-
rotypical people, as if emotional responses were somewhat disconnected from the self.
14 ARNAUD

Altogether, these studies suggest that emotional consciousness is more objective and less
intuitive for autistic children than for neurotypical ones. This supports the hypothesis of a
third-person perspective on one's own emotions in autism, rather than a first-person one that
would be found in neurotypicality (Arnaud, 2020b).

5 | C ON C L U S I ON

As consciousness makes one aware of information about the world, self-consciousness allows
one to represent oneself, one's identity. In this paper the self is described in terms of four
dimensions that can become conscious by two modes of access, through a first-person perspec-
tive, or through a third-person one.
I suggest that while autistic people have rich internal lives and build identities through all
dimensions of the self, they are characterized by particularities in the perspective they have on
themselves. They have a tendency to relate to their identity in a detached way, using external
and explicit representations of themselves, pointing to an increased reliance on third-person
self-consciousness in autism. By contrast, neurotypical people seem to favor a direct and unme-
diated self-consciousness through a first-person perspective.
If this hypothesis is promising for a unified explanation of particularities related to the self
in autism, such as those proposed by predictive coding theories of cognition, alternative taxon-
omies and conceptualizations of the self could reveal different sub-mechanisms for different
dimensions of the self. Conversely, considering how different dimensions of the self-overlap
(and the numerous taxonomies that group together some of the aforementioned dimensions), it
is possible that broader cognitive atypicalities may underlie not only self-consciousness, but
other autistic social, sensory-perceptual, and emotional processes. However, considering the
complexity of findings, it may be premature to insist on a unified explanation of autism
(Brunsdon & Happé, 2014). For this reason, this paper has given an account of self-
consciousness in autism without suggesting a unified theory of autistic cognition.
Nevertheless, as this literature on the self in autism continues to grow, future research
would benefit from investigating the mechanisms involved in first-person and third-person
modes of access to information. One avenue would draw on dual process theories, according to
which indirect and inferential mental processes are more effortful, slower, error prone, and
time consuming than automatic ones (Evans & Stanovich, 2013). Third-person access to oneself
may be particularly demanding and represent an onerous use of resources. Predictive coding
theories are also promising for discovering these mechanisms. Moreover, there is an abundant
and growing body of research on the neuro-correlates of atypicalities about the self in autism
(see Uddin, 2011 for a review). Further research could link these studies with the conclusions
presented here to further refine the idea of a third-person perspective of the self in autism.

ACK NO WLE DGE MEN TS

I am particularly grateful to Jesse Prinz, who believed in this project before I did, for his useful
comments on the first versions. I thank the three anonymous reviewers for their illuminating
suggestions and edits. I also thank Ruth Campbell, who provided a highly precise reading and a
tremendous editorial work.

ORCID
Sarah Arnaud https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3725-6224
ARNAUD 15

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How to cite this article: Arnaud S. Self-consciousness in autism: A third-person

perspective on the self. Mind & Language. 2020;1–17. https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12356