Individual differences in perception and in social cognition are products of both biology and cultural experience. Many of the same differences that typify autism when they occur in extremes also underlie normal human cognitive variation when they occur to more subtle degrees. In particular, autism spectrum conditions are characterised by low degrees of two linked capacities: level of construal, meaning the tendency to represent percepts as individual details rather than as whole contexts; and psychological distance, meaning the tendencies to perceive objects and events in distant rather than peri-personal space, to recall or to anticipate past or future time rather than the here-and-now, to approach social interactions in the allocentric frame of other people rather than one's own egocentric frame, and to represent hypothetical, counterfactual, or fictional beliefs that are at odds with actual facts. Significantly, culture also exerts linked effects on level of construal and psychological distance, which are relatively increased in more contextual, socially focussed cultures and decreased in more individualistic, self-focussed cultures. A question for cross-cultural psychological research, then, is how might lifelong exposure to South Asian cultures, in contrast to North American or European cultures, modify the phenotype of Asperger syndrome, and in general the phenotypes of those individuals at or just beyond the mild end of the autism spectrum. This mild extreme is the most likely locus of difference, as individuals with mild Asperger syndrome or the "broader autism phenotype" are not immediately visibly abnormal, and therefore are more easily accepted by the surrounding society, interact more with it, and are more effectively influenced by it. Furthermore, when their social communicative deficits do become manifest, the resulting social disabilities may be to some extent scaffolded and filled in by a surrounding society in which many social goals and relationships are explicit and algorithmic rather than implicit and underspecified. The relationship between autism-spectrum severity and the effects of a social-contextually focussed culture may be a parabolic one, with increased social scaffolding ameliorating the autistic phenotype at the mild end of the spectrum and social exclusion aggravating it at the severe end. Perhaps most significantly, gender roles may interact with Asperger syndrome, in an environment in which less empathising and social communicative skill is demanded of males, and females with deficits in these social cognitive domains therefore are placed at an inordinate disadvantage. Our current work is exploring these questions and theses, using both questionnaire and experimental behavioural measures to assay perception, attention, executive function and social cognition, both in individuals with Asperger syndrome and in clinically unaffected family members with high loadings for the broader autism phenotype.

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