AUTHOR=Kumar Amit 

TITLE=Unique models of embodied cognition and eco-social niches proposed to validate hypothesis of social attunement and mis-attunement with a focus on autism

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychiatry

VOLUME=Volume 16 - 2025

YEAR=2025

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1562061

DOI=10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1562061

ISSN=1664-0640

ABSTRACT=This paper uses basic concepts of embodied cognition based on the idea that the biology of the brain is impacted by the physics of movement and the interacting physical objects as well as biological markets or competition. These concepts are leveraged to explain the emergence of autism features and characteristics through multiple hypotheses using hidden states and eco-social niche. I begin by defining cognitive granularity, which forms the basis of my embodied cognition hypotheses. These hypotheses leverage cognitive psychology concepts to distinguish three dyads—resource proxy, executor, and evaluator—each with different sensorimotor skills for action control and action perception. Each of these dyads interacts with the environment in physically distinct and beneficial ways leading to iterative honing of the dyads’ individual skills: dialects of internalization and externalization. Collectively, these interacting dyads further form the basis of social attunement and mis-attunement—dialects of individual and collective. The social attunement hypotheses apply economic concepts of supply/demand curve and Nash equilibrium or game theory to the evolving human (hominin) biological market to derive eco-social niches for modeling the underlying neurotypical dyads: executor and evaluator. I hypothesize that insufficient sensorimotor integration within a dyad impedes proper participation in the eco-social niche, leading to psychiatric issues. In my model, this mis-attunement is reflected in the characteristics of the resource proxy and extreme evaluator dyads.