Autistic Adults are Not Impaired at Maintaining or Switching Between Counterfactual and Factual Worlds: An ERP Study

Abstract

We report an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment that tests whether autistic adults are able to maintain and switch between counterfactual and factual worlds. Participants (N = 48) read scenarios that set up a factual or counterfactual scenario, then either maintained the counterfactual world or switched back to the factual world. When the context maintained the world, participants showed appropriate detection of the inconsistent critical word. In contrast, when participants had to switch from a counterfactual to factual world, they initially experienced interference from the counterfactual context, then favoured the factual interpretation of events. None of these effects were modulated by group, despite group-level impairments in Theory of Mind and cognitive flexibility among the autistic adults. These results demonstrate that autistic adults can appropriately use complex contextual cues to maintain and/or update mental representations of counterfactual and factual events.

The electrophysiology of semantic processing in individuals with autism spectrum disorder: A meta-analysis

“…The P-value of the Egger test was 0.064, which con rmed that the results did not suffer from publication bias. N400 effect difference between ASD and Controls Among the articles, nine studies included a different wave of N400 between congruent and incongruent conditions [44][45][46][47][48][49][50] . The xed effect model was selected as acceptable heterogeneity (I 2 = 0.000%, Q = 1.751).…”

“…A total of 14 articles and 18 studies were included for applying the linguistic stimuli [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43] . Five effect sizes were computed to examine the N400 and P600 responses under the linguistic stimulus, including N400 amplitude, N400 different wave, N400 amplitude for congruent condition, N400 amplitude for incongruent condition, and P600 amplitude.…”

“…Five studies compared the N400 amplitude for congruent/related conditions between ASD and control groups [45][46][47][48][49] . The synthetic result revealed that the N400 amplitude for congruent condition between the two groups was insigni cant and the studies in the pool were heterogeneous (Hedges' g=-0.017, 95% CI ranged from − 0.632 to 0.597, P = 0.955, I 2 = 80.454%, Q = 25.581) (Fig.…”

The Electrophysiology of Semantic Processing in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Meta-Analysis

“…In 14 articles and 18 studies, the N400 and P600 were elicited by linguistic stimuli [18,21,22,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. Among the linguistic stimuli, some were presented with sentence in the semantic anomalies paradigm; the others were presented with words in the semantic priming paradigm or in-category and outof-category words paradigm.…”

“…Five effect sizes were computed to examine the N400 and P600 responses under the linguistic stimulus, including N400 amplitude, N400 different wave, N400 amplitude in congruent condition, N400 amplitude in incongruent condition, and P600 amplitude. The N400 amplitudes difference under linguistic stimulus Thirteen articles and 17 studies compared N400 amplitude differences elicited by linguistic stimuli between autistic and nonautistic group [18,21,22,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41]. The sample size of the two groups were 218 and 237, respectively.…”