Social Relevant Stimuli and Cognitive Flexibility In Autism

Background:   Children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are known to show difficulties in cognitive flexibility in everyday life, but research data are inconsistent. Studies on cognitive flexibility differ on type of stimuli used, and predictability of task-switch. Children with ASD seem to perform as good as typically developing (TD) children on tasks using pictures as stimuli that are easy to process. However, in everyday life, the interpretation of complex stimuli is needed to adept your behavior to the changing environment. Moreover, while in experimental tasks the adaptation to the environment is predictable; in day-to-day live the children with ASD have to cope with unpredictable changes.

Objectives:   To bridge the gap between day-to-day flexibility and cognitive flexibility as measured in the laboratory, we developed a task in which the sorting rules are relatively simple, but the stimuli are complex (faces) and the switches will be unpredictable. By using faces as stimuli, some social interpretation is needed and, therefore, the task has a closer resemblance to real life flexibility as classical switch tasks.

Methods:   Twenty-four children with ASD and 24 age- (range between 8 and 12 years), and gender-matched TD children will perform a gender-emotion switch-task. Stimuli consist of male and female faces with a happy or angry expression. Children need to switch between two sorting rules; sorting on facial expression or on gender. The switch of the sorting rule (after 2, 3 or 4 trials) is unpredictable for the children.

Results:   Data for the TD children are collected, while the data collection of the ASD group will be finished this March. Based on our preliminary data-analysis, we predict that children in the ASD group perform differently on the gender-emotion switch-task compared to the TD group. In the TD group children with less ASD symptoms (as measured with the Social Responsiveness Scale) perform better in the gender than in the emotion task; they make less errors in repeat- as well as switch-trials. Children with more ASD symptoms however, seem to show relatively more slowing in the emotions task, but there is no effect on accuracy. Children with more ASD symptoms seem to work slower when emotions need to be processed.

Conclusions:   The results should provide information to what extend the cognitive flexibility impairment in children with ASD in everyday life is possible to measure in a research setting if the complexity of stimuli used and unpredictability are taken into account.