Attentional capacities in children with autism: is there a general deficit in shifting focus?

Wilkinson et al. (1998) watched autistic kids do two computer games. One game kept their eyes on a spot. The other asked them to sort cards by color, shape, or number.

The team wanted to know if these kids had trouble moving their attention from one rule to the next.

The kids kept their eyes on the spot as well as typical kids. They also shifted rules on most trials without trouble.

Only on the card-sort game did they get stuck. They kept sorting by the old rule even after the rule changed. The hitch was not in shifting, but in letting go of the old rule.

Weiss et al. (2001) seems to disagree. They saw high-functioning autism kids lag when switching from small to big pictures. The tasks differ: M et al. used cards; J et al. used local-global pictures. The clash fades when you see both papers point to sticky attention under specific cues, not a broad deficit.

Kaland et al. (2008) ran the same card game on a screen and found autistic kids lost focus mid-task. This backs M et al.'s idea that disengagement, not poor shifting, hurts scores.

Higgins et al. (2021) used math models on a new task and showed that slow punishment learning, not weak shifting, drives poor set-shifting scores. This newer work supersedes the old view that autistic kids lack flexible thinking.

Simpson et al. (2025) added eye-tracking to the card game. Autistic kids looked away from errors faster, missing the chance to correct. This extends M et al. by showing how weak error-monitoring links to stuck performance.

You can drop the label "rigid thinker." When an autistic client stalls on a sorting task, prime them to release the old set: flash a brief break screen, give a vocal cue like "new rule," or highlight the new category in bright color. These tiny disengagement boosts often lift accuracy without extra drills.