Conceptual problem-solving in highly verbal, nonretarded autistic men.

The team gave the Wisconsin Card Sort Test to a small group of highly verbal autistic men.

All men had normal IQ and good spoken language. A matched set of typical men took the same test.

The test asks people to sort cards by secret rules that change without warning. It checks how fast someone can drop an old rule and pick a new one.

The autistic men made far more perseverative errors. They kept using the old rule long after it stopped working.

They also struggled to say what the new rule was, even after the tester told them they were wrong.

Daily living scores did not predict who would fail the test, so good life skills did not mean good card-sorting.

Leung et al. (2014) looked at dozens of similar studies and found that most lab flexibility tests, including the WCST, do not cleanly separate autistic from typical groups. The 1985 study is one of the data points inside that review, so the old “big deficit” picture is now seen as shakier.

Alderson-Day (2011) shows the same planning weakness in autistic children using a Twenty Questions game. Together the two papers hint that rule-shifting trouble may last from childhood into adulthood, even when language looks strong.

Goldstein et al. (1991) also found sequential-processing problems in high-functioning autistic kids. The pattern across studies suggests that step-by-step thinking, not just card sorting, is the core hitch.

Do not trust “high verbal” or “normal IQ” to mean executive skills are intact. Add a quick WCST or similar shift task to your assessment battery. If the client gets stuck in old rules, build extra prompts, written cues, or visual timers into daily routines and job coaching.