“…Alternatively, it is posited that high executive functions may protect children with genetic risks from ASD by compensating atypical functioning in other brain systems in their early life (Johnson, 2012) and could mask symptoms of ASD despite persisting core deficits at cognitive and/or neurobiological levels in individuals with ASD (Livingston, Colvert, Social Relationships Study, Bolton, & Happé, 2019; Livingston & Happe, 2017). Although current evidence does not find impairment in a single subdomain of executive functions to be a universal feature of individuals with ASD (Demetriou et al, 2018), it is generally accepted that executive function deficits are widespread in individuals with ASD and individual variation of executive functions may contribute to the heterogeneity of other area of difficulty in ASD, language, (Weismer, Kaushanskaya, Larson, Mathée, & Bolt, 2018) and adaptive functioning (Kenny, Cribb, & Pellicano, 2018) for instance.…”