The Autism-Spectrum Quotient and Visual Search: Shallow and Deep Autistic Endophenotypes.
High Autism-Spectrum Quotient scores in typical adults do not mirror autistic visual search strengths.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked adults without autism to fill out the Autism-Spectrum Quotient.
They then gave the same adults a visual search task on a computer.
The goal was to see if high scorers on the questionnaire would act like autistic people on the task.
What they found
High-AQ adults did not show the faster, more accurate search pattern often seen in autism.
The result breaks the common habit of treating a high score as a stand-in for the diagnosis.
How this fits with other research
Koegel et al. (2014) already warned that AQ scores cannot be compared at face value across autistic and non-autistic groups.
Takahashi et al. (2013) found a similar mismatch: high-AQ typical adults did not copy autism-linked memory patterns.
Lindor et al. (2018) and Keehn et al. (2016) show that even within autism the visual-search edge is shaky and task-bound.
Together these papers kill the idea that "a little bit autistic" on paper equals autistic performance in the lab.
Why it matters
If you run social-skills or attention research, do not recruit "high-AQ" college students and claim you are studying autism.
Use diagnosed participants or adjust your conclusions.
The same caution applies when reading journals: flag any paper that swaps a questionnaire score for the real thing.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Check your intake forms—remove any language that equates high AQ with autism.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
A high Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ) score (Baron-Cohen et al. in J Autism Dev Disord 31(1):5-17, 2001) is increasingly used as a proxy in empirical studies of perceptual mechanisms in autism. Several investigations have assessed perception in non-autistic people measured for AQ, claiming the same relationship exists between performance on perceptual tasks in high-AQ individuals as observed in autism. We question whether the similarity in performance by high-AQ individuals and autistics reflects the same underlying perceptual cause in the context of two visual search tasks administered to a large sample of typical individuals assessed for AQ. Our results indicate otherwise and that deploying the AQ as a proxy for autism introduces unsubstantiated assumptions about high-AQ individuals, the endophenotypes they express, and their relationship to Autistic Spectrum Conditions (ASC) individuals.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2016 · doi:10.1007/s10803-013-1951-3