Explaining Enhanced Logical Consistency during Decision Making in Autism

Abstract

The emotional responses elicited by the way options are framed often results in lack of logical consistency in human decision making. In this study, we investigated subjects with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) using a financial task in which the monetary prospects were presented as either loss or gain. We report both behavioral evidence that ASD subjects show a reduced susceptibility to the framing effect and psycho-physiological evidence that they fail to incorporate emotional context into the decision-making process. On this basis, we suggest that this insensitivity to contextual frame, although enhancing choice consistency in ASD, may also underpin core deficits in this disorder. These data highlight both benefits and costs arising from multiple decision processes in human cognition.

A computational perspective on autism

“…It is therefore intriguing to speculate that a decrease in the suppressive field gain term in autism can result in reduced contextual sensitivity in value-based decisions. Consistent with this prediction, enhanced logical consistency in value-based decisions is observed in autism as a consequence of reduced susceptibility to contextual framing (76).…”

Opposing Oxytocin Effects on Intergroup Cooperative Behavior in Intuitive and Reflective Minds

“…Bipolar patients were more intuitive than unipolar depressed patients (Liebowitz et al, 1979;Janowsky et al, 1999). Autism patients were characterized by deficient intuition and lacked spontaneous adaptation (Allman et al, 2005;De Martino et al, 2008). A recent study has shown behavioral and psychophysiological evidence that autism patients were more rational and less likely to be guided by their intuition and emotional context in a financial task (De Martino et al, 2008).…”

“…Autism patients were characterized by deficient intuition and lacked spontaneous adaptation (Allman et al, 2005;De Martino et al, 2008). A recent study has shown behavioral and psychophysiological evidence that autism patients were more rational and less likely to be guided by their intuition and emotional context in a financial task (De Martino et al, 2008). Our findings of opposing oxytocin effects on social cognition draw caution to the oxytocin pharmacotherapy for social dysfunction in that whether the effects of oxytocin on social functioning or emotional processing are facilitative, debilitative, or null, depending on an individual's cognitive style (Bartz et al, 2011a).…”

The Oxford Handbook of Psychiatric Ethics, Volume 2

“…The phenomenon of depressive realism is controversial (for recent evidence against the phenomenon, see Baker et al 2011), but similar phenomena have been observed for other diagnoses. There is evidence in autism and schizophrenia that the reasoning tendencies partially responsible for the formation of pathological beliefs, or underlying pathological behavior, can also have epistemic benefits relative to those found in the non-clinical population (Tateno 2013;De Martino et al 2008;Owen et al 2007). For instance, people with schizophrenia have been found to be less vulnerable to framing effects, and do not exhibit a statistically normal but procedurally irrational increased tendency to gamble when faced with a certain loss (Brown et al 2013).…”

“…This processing style confers many advantages, but also disadvantages, as seen in the difficulty that most people have remembering random lists of words; in visual illusions induced by contextual features; and in framing effects that are examples of epistemic irrationality that is widespread in the general population. On a range of these kinds of tasks there is increasing evidence that autistic people tend to outperform non-clinical controls (e.g., De Martino et al 2008; for overview Happe 1999, Mottron 2011.…”