Disorders of regulation of cognitive activity in autistic children.
Autistic kids show loose cognitive control under abstract demands, but later studies prove the skill can be trained.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Einfeld et al. (1995) watched autistic kids and kids matched on mental age do Piaget-style tasks.
The tasks asked for higher-order thinking, like keeping a rule in mind while new toys appeared.
The team counted how often each child stuck with the old rule even after it stopped working.
What they found
Autistic children made more of these stuck, or perseverative, errors.
Their game plans jumped around more, showing loose cognitive control.
In short, when the job got abstract, regulation crumbled.
How this fits with other research
Reed et al. (2013) ran a card-sort shift with low-functioning preschoolers and saw the same stuck errors, proving the problem starts early and lasts.
Micai et al. (2021) moved the lens to reading goals and found autistic students still failed to switch strategies, so the issue is not tied to baby toys.
Anthony et al. (2020) flips the mood: after a short CBT package, some autistic 8- to 12-year-olds got better at emotion regulation. The 1995 paper shows the skill gap; the 2020 paper shows it can shrink with help.
Uljarević et al. (2018) links parent-rated dysregulation in toddlers to later poor daily living scores, turning lab errors into real-life struggles.
Why it matters
Your learner may look stubborn when rules change, but the 1995 data say the brain is losing its set.
Add extra prompt cards, model the shift aloud, and give many brief trials before the rule flips.
Track errors session-to-session; a drop in stuck responses is your first sign that cognitive flexibility is growing.
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Join Free →Before you change task rules, show the new rule on a card, model an example, and give three quick practice trials to cut perseverative errors.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Infantile autism is a pervasive developmental disorder characterized by disturbances concerning not only the areas of socialization and communication ("aloneness") but also the ability to modify and change behavior ("need for sameness"). In most recent studies, various abnormal and deviant cognitive activities, such as the ability to regulate one's behavior, were considered as accounting for these signs. In this report, we examined the regulation of cognitive activity, from a developmental perspective in comparing autistic with mentally retarded children matched in a pairwise manner by global, verbal, and nonverbal developmental ages. All children were tested with tasks adapted from the Object Permanence Test which corresponds to Piaget's sensorimotor development Stages IV to VI. Results showed that autistic children had a pervasive difficulty in maintenance set, made more perseverative errors when the abstraction degree of task was higher, and were more variable in their behavioral strategies. Discussion is focused on the interests and limits of these tasks for the examination of regulation activity from diagnostic and developmental perspectives. Finally, interpretations about recent neuropsychological and neurophysiological works, and additional interdisciplinary studies are suggested.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 1995 · doi:10.1007/BF02179287