Question: Did you consider demand characteristics during your study into how ASD impacts children's ability to identify ownership, as TD children may have understood the purpose of the study more than ASD children?

John J Shaw answered on 20 Jul 2021:

We certainly have tried to mitigate that as much as possible, but the issue of demand characteristics is always possible. I think within our paper the amount of participants would mean it is highly unlikely that demand characteristics would be present across all the participants in the ASD group (it may be present for 1-2).

What you’ve said regarding understanding the purpose, I don’t think that would be the case. The study was presented as a naturalistic game that we play where we would draw pictures and then one person would say they want to take all the pictures for themselves, it mirrors what would happen within a classroom full of children. One thing I am aware of is simply by being adults we might have had some effect as we are interpreted as an authority figure, so we are looking at running a follow up with children/siblings as ‘mini experimenters’