Error monitoring in decision-making and timing is disrupted in autism spectrum disorder.
Kids with ASD may get the answer right yet still not notice when they’re wrong—build self-monitoring into your trials.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Doenyas et al. (2019) watched children with autism do two computer games. One game asked them to pick the better picture. The other asked them to press a button after a certain time.
The kids got feedback after each try. The team then checked if the children noticed their own mistakes. They compared the autism group to typically-developing peers of the same age.
What they found
Both groups chose the right picture and hit the button on time equally well. The difference showed up after errors.
Children with autism rarely said, "I messed up." Their brain response to errors was also smaller. They could do the task, but they did not spot when they were wrong.
How this fits with other research
Minassian et al. (2007) seems to disagree. In that study adults with autism made better decisions when the game gave lots of wins. The adults used the feedback, while the kids in Ceymi’s study ignored it. Age is the likely splitter: adults may learn to use feedback, but kids still miss it.
Simó-Pinatella et al. (2013) found another timing issue: children with autism forgot to act at a set time, yet they were fine when a cue told them to act. Together the papers show the problem is not keeping time; it is noticing internal signals that say, "Something is off.
Tonizzi et al. (2022) meta-analysis backs this up. When autism and ADHD overlap, working memory and self-monitoring drop even lower. Screening for ADHD symptoms can explain why some clients seem blind to their errors.
Why it matters
If a client keeps making the same mistake, do not assume he can’t do the skill. He may simply not know he erred. Build in explicit self-check steps: ask, "Was that right?" after each trial, teach him to watch for the red X, or record his own responses and review them. A quick self-monitoring prompt can turn a stalled program into rapid gains.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulties in social interactions. The cognitive domains that support these interactions include perceptual decision-making, timing, and error-monitoring, which enable one to appropriately understand and react to the other individual in communicative settings. This study constitutes a comprehensive exploration of decision-making and interval timing in ASD as well as the first investigation of error-monitoring abilities of individuals with ASD regarding their performance in the corresponding domains. We found that children with ASD fared similar to typically developing (TD) children in their first-order task performance in two-alternative forced choice perceptual decision-making and temporal reproduction tasks as well as the secondary tasks (signal detection and free finger tapping tasks). Yet, they had a deficit in error-monitoring in both tasks where their accuracy did not predict their confidence ratings, which was the case for the TD group. The difference between ASD and TD groups was limited to error-monitoring performance. This study attests to a circumscribed impairment in error-monitoring in individuals with ASD, which may partially underlie their social interaction problems. This difficulty in cognitively evaluating one's own performance may also relate to theory of mind deficits reported for individuals with ASD, where they struggle in understanding the mental states and intentions of others. This novel finding holds the potential to inform effective interventions for individuals with ASD that can target this error-monitoring ability to have broad-ranging effects in multiple domains involved in communication and social interaction. Autism Res 2019, 12: 239-248 © 2018 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Decision-making, timing, and error-monitoring are three of many abilities that underlie smooth social interactions. To date, these domains have been only investigated separately, but given their interactive role in social interactions that are impaired in ASD, we conducted the first study to investigate them together. Children with ASD were as successful as typically developing children in their task performances, but unlike them, were unaware of their errors in both decision-making and timing tasks. This deficit that is limited to error-monitoring can contribute to unraveling the unique cognitive signature of ASD and to formulating interventions with positive implications in multiple domains.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2019 · doi:10.1002/aur.2041