Cultural Differences in Cognitive Flexibility and Autism Traits; A Comparison between Malaysia and the United Kingdom

Background:

Individuals with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are reported to have daily life difficulties in cognitive flexibility. However, when measuring cognitive flexibility with experimental or clinical tasks, findings are inconclusive. Individuals with ASD seem to perform worse than typically developing (TD) individuals on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST). Switch task findings are less clear, but performance on a Gender-Emotion Switch Task appears to be related to repetitive and stereotyped behaviour in children with ASD. Remarkably, Malaysian university students report more flexibility problems compared to students from the United Kingdom (UK) on the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ; attention switching subscale). It is unclear whether the higher AQ scores reflect an actual difference in cognitive flexibility, or a cultural difference in how individuals from these two countries fill in questionnaires.

Objectives:

The aim is to study whether there is a difference between students from Malaysia and the UK in cognitive flexibility when measured with a diverse range of tasks, and whether this can be explained by differing levels of autistic traits.

Methods:

A digital version of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST), the Gender-Emotion Switch Task, the AQ, the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS), and the Cognitive Flexibility Index (CFI) are administered to 120 students (60 from Malaysia and 60 from the UK). We expect that individuals in the UK who report more cognitive flexibility problems on the questionnaires will perform worse on the tasks. However, we expect that this relation will not be as clear in Malaysia. Moreover, we expect that Malaysian participants will report being less flexible on the AQ, SRS and CFI compared to UK participants, but we expect similar task performance in both countries.

Results:

Currently 28 individuals completed the study in Malaysia. Data collection in the UK will take place from November 2017 onwards. In the Malaysian subsample there were no significant correlations between the questionnaires and the task performance after Bonferroni correction. However, the correlation between the Switch Task (switch costs in error rate), and the SRS repetitive behaviour scale showed a trend towards significance r = -.38, p<.05, indicating that higher switch costs are related to less repetitive behaviour.

Conclusions:

The current study aims to unravel whether higher reported cognitive flexibility deficits in Malaysia compared to the UK reflect a difference in cognitive flexibility, or in answering tendency. In a broader sense, the aim is to determine whether western developed questionnaires that screen for ASD are applicable in Malaysia. If individuals in Malaysia score higher on ASD screeners in general, it might be indicated to heighten the cut off score. However, if the higher scores reflect an actual deficit or problem, this should be taken seriously. The next step is to study whether the findings are also replicable in individuals with ASD in both countries.