The role of interstimulus interval and "Stimulus-type" in prepotent response inhibition abilities in people with ASD: A quantitative and qualitative review.
Standard inhibition tests give reliable results in autism; timing gaps and stimulus choice do not change the outcome.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Eussen et al. (2016) pooled every paper they could find on prepotent response inhibition in autism.
They asked two simple questions: Does timing between cues matter? Does the kind of stimulus matter?
By crunching the group differences they hoped to tell clinicians if test settings change the score.
What they found
Across studies, people with ASD showed a medium-sized inhibition deficit.
Neither short nor long gaps between cues changed the size of that gap.
Bright, loud or social stimuli did not make the deficit bigger or smaller.
In plain words: the problem is real, but you cannot blame the timer or the pictures you pick.
How this fits with other research
Early et al. (2012) looked at children and saw intact prepotent inhibition, a seeming clash with the meta-analysis. The kids in that lab task were younger and used simpler stop-signal games, so the deficit may bloom later or need harder rules.
Sanderson et al. (2013) also found impairment only on conflict tasks like Stroop, not on every inhibition test. Their narrow result fits the meta-analysis when you see "medium overall" is an average across many sub-tests.
Adams et al. (2021) zoomed in on proactive versus reactive control. They showed autistic learners fail to slow themselves before the cue, not to stop after it. The meta-analysis supports this by finding the same deficit no matter how soon the cue arrives.
Lindor et al. (2019) tied poor distractor inhibition to the ASD subgroup that also has motor delays. The meta-analysis did not split participants this way, so future reviews may find the deficit is smaller when motor issues are absent.
Why it matters
You can trust standard inhibition tests for autism; changing ISI or stimulus type will not give a false pass or fail. If a child scores low, the deficit is probably real, not an artifact of your timer or picture set. When results look mild, check for co-occurring ADHD or motor problems and probe conflict-style tasks before deciding inhibition is intact.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are associated with prepotent response inhibition difficulties. However, the large variation between studies suggests that understudied factors, such as interstimulus interval (ISI) and "stimulus-type" (both hypothesized proxies of stressors influencing arousal), might influence the inhibitory abilities of people with ASD. Using meta-analysis, we tested whether differences in prepotent response inhibition between people with and without ASD was influenced by ISI. There was not enough variation in "stimulus-type" between the studies to include it as a moderator. Thirty-seven studies met inclusion criteria, with a combined sample size of 950 people with ASD and 966 typically developing controls. Additionally, a qualitative review including studies comparing a neutral and an arousing condition in one experiment was performed to examine whether fast ISI or specific arousing stimuli directly influence prepotent response inhibition. The meta-analysis indicated that ISI was not a relevant moderator. The qualitative review showed that ISI and "stimulus-type" had the same effect for both groups. Although all studies regarding ISI indicated that fast ISI worsened performance, different types of stimuli had either a positive or a negative influence. This could suggest that distinctive stimuli might affect arousal differently. While we replicated the inhibition difficulties in people with ASD (g = .51), our results do not show strong ASD-specific effects of ISI or "stimulus-type" on inhibition. Nonetheless, ISI and "stimulus-type" do seem to influence performance. Future research focusing on potential underlying factors (e.g., baseline physiological arousal) is needed to examine why this is the case. Autism Res 2016, 9: 1124-1141. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2016 · doi:10.1002/aur.1631