Reduced distractor interference in neurotypical adults with high expression of autistic traits irrespective of stimulus type.
High autistic traits in typical adults sharpen distractor blocking yet can dull flexible learning.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Muller Spaniol et al. (2018) asked neurotypical adults to do two computer attention tasks.
Before the tasks, everyone filled out the Autism-Spectrum Quotient.
The team then compared people who scored high versus low on autistic traits.
What they found
High-trait adults ignored distractor pictures and sounds better than low-trait adults.
The boost showed up no matter what the distractors looked or sounded like.
Better filtering was not tied to one sense; it crossed vision and hearing.
How this fits with other research
Goris et al. (2021) seems to say the opposite. They saw high-trait adults do worse when reward rules kept changing.
Both studies used neurotypical adults and lab tasks, so the clash is real. The difference is the job: one asks you to ignore stuff, the other asks you to chase moving rewards.
Van Overwalle et al. (2025) and Laurie-Masi et al. (2022) move the question to diagnosed autistic adults. They find slower learning when rules shift, matching Judith’s picture more than Mayra’s. Together the four papers show: high traits may help you block noise but hurt you when the game keeps changing.
Why it matters
When you test clients with high autistic traits, don’t assume one cognitive profile. They may ace tasks that need sharp focus and still struggle when rewards flip. Break learning into small stable steps first, then add rule changes later. Use their strong filtering to cut visual clutter in your room, but give extra trials when the contingency shifts.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Remove extra posters and sounds from the teaching room, then add clear warning cues before you switch reinforcement rules.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Attention atypicality is evident in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and its broader phenotype with previous studies suggesting that in some cases participants can be more efficient at ignoring distracting irrelevant information. However, it is not clear to what extent this improved filtering capacity is driven by perceptual atypicality, such as local bias or atypical face processing, which is also sometimes reported in these populations. For instance, better ability to ignore the global aspect of a display could stem from a local perceptual bias rather than from improved distractor inhibition. To test whether distractor suppression per se, is associated with high expression of autistic traits, in the present study a large cohort of neurotypical participants (n = 218), in whom expression of autistic traits was assessed, performed two nonspatial attention selection tasks with different categories of stimuli (global/local and face/scene). Importantly, both tasks involved a conflict with one aspect of the stimuli designated as the target and the other designated as the distractor. Across the two experiments adults with high autistic traits were overall, better able to ignore distractors than adults with low autistic traits, irrespective of the type of perceptual processing involved. These results support the notion that autistic tendencies are associated with increased attention filtering (at least when target and distractor remain constant) which is not dependent on perceptual biases. Thus, future work in the broader autism phenotype should explicitly consider the effect played by attention mechanisms in this population. Autism Res 2018, 11: 1345-1355. © 2018 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: In the present study, we show that neurotypical adults with high autistic traits are better able to avoid distraction from conspicuous (but completely irrelevant) distractors when told in advance to do so. This ability is not affected by the type of visual input (for instance, whether the distractor is a face or whether small rather than large letters should be reported). This finding could be important in better understanding the way attention is utilized in Autism.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2018 · doi:10.1002/aur.2005