Preserved Proactive Interference in Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Bouck et al. (2016) asked if adults with autism hold onto old facts too tightly. They ran two lab tasks that normally trip people up with prior, but no longer useful, word pairs.

High-functioning adults with ASD and typical adults both served as participants. The researchers measured how much the old words slowed down learning of new pairs.

Both groups showed the same amount of proactive interference. The prior word pairs slowed everyone equally, so semantic updating looks intact in ASD.

No speed or accuracy differences emerged across the two experiments.

Adams et al. (2021) seems to disagree. They saw weaker proactive control in ASD during an eye-movement stop task. The clash fades when you note they tested a wide age span (3-25 yrs) and a motor, not verbal, task. Verbal updating stays fine; motor readiness to pause does not.

Pellecchia et al. (2016) and Maddox et al. (2015) also report memory gaps in ASD adults, but those studies targeted item or relational memory, not the ability to overwrite old word links. C et al.’s null result fits once you separate semantic interference from episodic or spatial recall.

Meta-analyses by Eussen et al. (2016) and Tonizzi et al. (2022) confirm inhibition deficits in ASD. None of their pooled tasks isolate proactive interference, so the new data add a fine-grain exception: the semantic part of inhibition works normally.

When you teach new vocabulary or safety rules, don’t assume prior information will block learning in adults with ASD. You can press ahead with confidence that their semantic system will update. If you see rigid behavior, look elsewhere—perhaps motor stopping or relational links—not at basic word overwriting.