Associative learning under uncertainty in adults with autism: Intact learning of the cue-outcome contingency, but slower updating of priors.
Autistic adults pick up new rules fine but need more reps when those rules flip.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Laurie-Masi et al. (2022) asked autistic and neurotypical adults to play a computer game. A shape on the screen predicted whether they would win or lose money.
Halfway through, the rule flipped. The shape that once meant win now meant lose. The team watched how fast each group updated their choices.
What they found
Both groups learned the first rule equally well. They picked the better shape and earned similar cash.
When the rule reversed, autistic adults took longer to shift. Their earlier correct choices stuck, even when those choices now lost money.
How this fits with other research
Van Overwalle et al. (2025) ran a similar lab task and added brain recordings. They also saw slower learning in autistic adults, plus unusual EEG waves. The two studies line up: basic learning is fine, but flexible updating lags.
Goris et al. (2021) looks like a clash. They found that neurotypical people with high autistic traits also struggled when reward rules changed. The twist: their sample had no autism diagnosis. The contradiction fades once you see one paper tested diagnosed adults and the other tested traits inside the typical range.
Muller Spaniol et al. (2018) adds another angle. Neurotypical adults with high traits actually got better at ignoring distractors. Again, the same trait label hides opposite results. Task matters: filtering static noise differs from tracking shifting probabilities.
Why it matters
When you teach a new vocational step or social script to an autistic adult, plan extra reversal trials. If the lunch menu, bus route, or work routine suddenly changes, do not assume one warning is enough. Build in repeated practice where the rule switches back and forth. Watch for lingering old responses and reinforce the new one until it sticks.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We have an internal representation of the world that guides our behavior, helps us predicting what comes next and therefore, reducing uncertainty. For instance, after hearing the noise of a door opening, we usually expect to see a person appearing, whose features differ depending on the context. In this example of associative learning, predictions need to be adjusted if there is a change in the environment (e.g. different person depending on the location). Recent theories suggest that the symptoms encountered in autism could be due to an atypical learning of predictions or to a decreased influence of these expectations on perception. Here, we conducted an experiment assessing whether adults with autism could learn and adjust their predictions in a changing environment. Throughout a behavioral task, participants learned to associate a sound with a visual outcome, but this association could sometimes reverse. Results showed that autistic adults could learn to make predictions that fitted the main sound-vision association, but were slower to adapt their expectations when there was an unannounced change in the environment. We also observed that both adults with and without autism tended to be biased by their expectations, as they reported seeing what they expected to see rather than what was actually shown. Altogether, our results indicate that autistic adults can learn predictions but are more inflexible to adjust these predictions in a changing environment. These results help refining recent theories of autism (called "predictive coding" theories), which intend to identify the core mechanisms underlying the autistic symptomatology.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2022 · doi:10.1177/13623613211045026