CKD-Associated Pruritus: Updates on Management and Future Directions.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with atypical social cognition, including difficulties in inferring others' mental states (Velikonja, Fett, & Velthorst, ). Among these processes, visual perspective taking (VPT) describes the ability to understand other people's visual perception of the environment. At a basic level (VPT‐1), it requires comprehending whether objects are visible to another person or not, whereas more demanding tasks (VPT‐2) involve mental rotation abilities to understand how visual input looks to others (Flavell, ). During infancy and toddlerhood, atypical early precursors of VPT such as gaze following are frequently linked to autism (Gillespie‐Lynch, Elias, Escudero, Hutman, & Johnson, ; Thorup, Nyström, Gredebäck, Bölte, & Falck‐Ytter, ). Evidence for explicit VPT performance in autistic toddlers and preschoolers is sparse, although attenuated VPT‐1 performance has been reported (Warreyn, Roeyers, Oelbrandt, & De Groote, ). During middle childhood and adolescence, autism is more consistently linked to reduced VPT‐2 performance (Hamilton, Brindley, & Frith, ; Ni, Xue, Cai, Wen, & He, ) or alternative task‐solving strategies (Conson et al., ; Pearson, Marsh, Ropar, & Hamilton, ). By adulthood, differences are reported less consistently (David et al., ; O'Connor, Plant, & Riggs, ), indicating a delayed and qualitatively altered developmental trajectory rather than global difficulties. While VPT differences in autism have been more consistently observed in VPT‐2 paradigms (Pearson, Ropar, & Hamilton, ), VPT‐1 tasks offer a methodological advantage for isolating specific cognitive mechanisms by engaging fewer concurrent processes. Beyond social processing, altered domain‐general functions have been associated with social cognition differences in autism (Bottema‐Beutel, Kim, & Crowley, ; Carlson, Mandell, & Williams, ). Visual processing depends on selective attention, which describes a differential enhancement of relevant and inhibition of irrelevant stimulus processing (Desimone & Duncan, ). During the calculation of visual perspectives, irrelevant input comprises stimuli that are not congruently available to both perspectives and must be selectively disregarded. Perspective incongruency thus increases demands for selective attention. Autistic individuals often exhibit reduced selective attention (Geurts, van den Bergh, & Ruzzano, ; Keehn, Nair, Lincoln, Townsend, & Müller, ), which may contribute to VPT difficulties.