Flexibility in autism during unpredictable shifts of socio-emotional stimuli: Investigation of group and sex differences.
Autistic adults only show extra flexibility trouble when social-emotional rules shift without warning.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lacroix et al. (2022) asked autistic and non-autistic adults to switch rules while looking at faces.
Sometimes the rule changed without warning and mixed feelings. Other times the rule stayed clear and predictable.
Everyone worked on a home computer so the test felt like a video call game.
What they found
Autistic adults slowed down more when the emotional rule shifted without warning.
When the rule was clear and predictable, both groups switched equally fast.
Autistic women looked a bit smoother than autistic men, hinting at camouflage.
How this fits with other research
Albein-Urios et al. (2018) already saw that adults with more autism traits say they are rigid, but lab games did not show it. The new study proves the trouble appears once the shift is hidden inside social cues.
Sapey-Triomphe et al. (2021) showed autistic adults learn expectations but do not tweak them when the scene changes. Adeline adds the tweak gets harder only when the change is both social and unpredictable.
Georgopoulos et al. (2022) found tiny emotion-recognition gaps between autistic and non-autistic adults. Adeline agrees the gap is small for simple emotion reading, yet widens when you must flexibly switch between emotions on the fly.
Why it matters
If your client stalls when the social vibe suddenly shifts, do not assume defiance. Announce the new rule aloud and give a brief pause. That simple cue can cut the extra switch cost Adeline measured.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Flexibility difficulties in autism might be particularly common in complex situations, when shifts (i.e. the switch of attentional resources or strategy according to the situation) are unpredictable, implicit (i.e. not guided by explicit rules) and the stimuli are complex. We analyzed the data of 101 autistic and 145 non-autistic adults, without intellectual deficiency, on two flexibility tasks performed online. The first task involved unpredictable and non-explicit shifts of complex socio-emotional stimuli, whereas the second task involved predictable and explicit shifts of character stimuli. Considering the discrepancies between laboratory results and the real-life flexibility-related challenges faced by autistic individuals, we need to determine which factor could be of particular importance in flexibility difficulties. We point out that the switch cost (i.e. the difference between shift and non-shift condition) was larger for autistic than for non-autistic participants on the complex flexibility task with unpredictable and non-explicit shifts of socio-emotional stimuli, whereas this was not the case when shifts were predictable, explicit and involved less complex stimuli. We also highlight sex differences, suggesting that autistic females have better social skills than autistic males and that they also have a specific cognitive profile, which could contribute to social camouflaging. The findings of this work help us understand which factors could influence flexibility difficulties in autism and are important for designing future studies. They also add to the literature on sex differences in autism which underpin better social skills, executive function, and camouflaging in autistic females.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2022 · doi:10.1177/13623613211062776