No abstract

Considering the mixed nature of reports of flexibility difficulties in autism, we hypothesized that a task that more closely resembles the challenges faced in real life would help to assess these difficulties. Autistic and typically developing adults performed an online Emotional Shifting Task, involving non-explicit unpredictable shifts of complex socio-emotional stimuli, and the Task Switching Task, involving explicit predictable shifts of simple character stimuli. Switch cost (i.e. the difference in performance between Shift and Non Shift conditions) was larger in the autistic group than in the comparison group for the Emotional Shifting Task but not for the Task Switching Task. Females responded faster than males in the Emotional Shifting Task. On the Task Switching Task, typically developing males responded faster than typically developing females, whereas there was a female advantage in the autistic group. Our findings suggest that factors such as predictability, explicitness of the shift rule, stimulus type as well as sex could play a critical role in flexibility difficulties in autism. Lay abstract Flexibility difficulties in autism might be particularly common in complex situations, when shifts (i.e. the switch of attentional resources or strategy according to the situation) are unpredictable, implicit (i.e. not guided by explicit rules) and the stimuli are complex. We analyzed the data of 101 autistic and 145 non-autistic adults, without intellectual deficiency, on two flexibility tasks performed online. The first task involved unpredictable and non-explicit shifts of complex socio-emotional stimuli, whereas the second task involved predictable and explicit shifts of character stimuli. Considering the discrepancies between laboratory results and the real-life flexibility-related challenges faced by autistic individuals, we need to determine which factor could be of particular importance in flexibility difficulties. We point out that the switch cost (i.e. the difference between shift and non-shift condition) was larger for autistic than for non-autistic participants on the complex flexibility task with unpredictable and non-explicit shifts of socio-emotional stimuli, whereas this was not the case when shifts were predictable, explicit and involved less complex stimuli. We also highlight sex differences, suggesting that autistic females have better social skills than autistic males and that they also have a specific cognitive profile, which could contribute to social camouflaging. The findings of this work help us understand which factors could influence flexibility difficulties in autism and are important for designing future studies. They also add to the literature on sex differences in autism which underpin better social skills, executive function, and camouflaging in autistic females.

Visual processing is thought to function in a coarse-to-fine manner. Low spatial frequencies (LSF), conveying coarse information, would be processed early to generate predictions. These LSF-based predictions would facilitate the further integration of high spatial frequencies (HSF), conveying fine details. The predictive role of LSF might be crucial in automatic face processing, where high performance could be explained by an accurate selection of clues in early processing. In the present study, we used a visual Mismatch Negativity (vMMN) paradigm by presenting an unfiltered face as standard stimulus, and the same face filtered in LSF or HSF as deviant, to investigate the predictive role of LSF vs. HSF during automatic face processing. If LSF are critical for predictions, we hypothesize that LSF deviants would elicit less prediction error (i.e., reduced mismatch responses) than HSF deviants. Results show that both LSF and HSF deviants elicited a mismatch response compared with their equivalent in an equiprobable sequence. However, in line with our hypothesis, LSF deviants evoke significantly reduced mismatch responses compared to HSF deviants, particularly at later stages. The difference in mismatch between HSF and LSF conditions involves posterior areas and right fusiform gyrus. Overall, our findings suggest a predictive role of LSF during automatic face processing and a critical involvement of HSF in the fusiform during the conscious detection of changes in faces.