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The Attentional Set Shifting Task: A Measure of Cognitive Flexibility in Mice
09:15

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Cognitive flexibility in ASD; task switching with emotional faces.

Marieke de Vries1, Hilde M Geurts

  • 1Brain and Cognition, Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Weesperplein 4, 1018 XA Amsterdam, The Netherlands. m.devries@uva.nl

Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders
|March 30, 2012
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) do not struggle with cognitive flexibility on ecologically valid tasks. However, some children with ASDs show slower performance, especially when disengaging from emotional tasks.

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Area of Science:

  • Neurodevelopmental disorders
  • Cognitive psychology
  • Developmental psychology

Background:

  • Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) often exhibit cognitive flexibility deficits in daily life.
  • Laboratory studies on cognitive flexibility in ASDs have yielded inconsistent results.
  • There is a need for ecologically valid tasks to assess cognitive flexibility in children with ASDs.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate cognitive flexibility in children with ASDs using an ecologically valid task.
  • To examine performance on a gender-emotion switch task in children with and without ASDs.
  • To identify specific challenges in cognitive flexibility within the ASD group.

Main Methods:

  • A gender-emotion switch task was administered to 31 children with ASDs (8-12 years) and 31 typically developing controls.
  • The task incorporated unannounced switches and complex emotional face stimuli to enhance ecological validity.
  • Minimal working memory load was maintained to prevent confounding factors.

Main Results:

  • Overall performance on the switch task did not significantly differ between children with ASDs and controls.
  • A subset of children with ASDs demonstrated slower and less accurate performance.
  • Within the ASD group, switching from emotion to gender trials was slower than the reverse, indicating difficulty disengaging from emotional task sets.

Conclusions:

  • Children with ASDs can perform comparably to controls on ecologically valid cognitive flexibility tasks.
  • Specific difficulties may arise in disengaging from emotional task sets within the ASD group.
  • These findings highlight the importance of considering task context and emotional processing in cognitive flexibility assessments for ASDs.