Joint attention effect on irrelevant stimuli resistance in high functional autism and neurotypical adults

Clinical practice reveals that individuals with autism characterized by the absence of cognitive impairment (High Functioning Autism-HFA) show difficulty in sharing attention with unfamiliar people. We hypothesized that this difficulty could affect cognitive control by selectively impairing stimulus-encoding or response-selection.

Twenty-one HFA and 23 neurotypical adults were involved in a two-phase study. The first phase was performed at home, through an online link; the second one was held four months later in our laboratory in the presence of two experimenters. A letter-flanker task was administered in both phases. In the Stimulus-Response (SR) conflict condition, the target and flankers were assigned to the same/different response keys. In the Stimulus-Stimulus (SS) conflict condition, the target and flankers were perceptually similar/dissimilar. Two mixed-ANOVAs were conducted on response times and accuracy with Phases (Home vs Lab), Groups (HFA, Neurotypical), SR conditions (congruent, incongruent, neutral) and SS conditions (congruent, incongruent) as factors.

Results show that only HFAs' inhibition ability was negatively affected by the experimenters' presence compared to when they were alone, by reducing accuracy when dealing with an SS conflict.

The differences between the home-phase and lab-phase sessions require further elaboration to understanding the nature of social interaction during the lab session.

These results suggest that, for HFA, the "at home" context, free from social and emotional pressure, allowed them to emphasize their detail-focused cognitive style.