Autistic interests: wide-ranging and intellectually oriented

The interests of autistic individuals have traditionally been described as circumscribed and restricted, serving the functions of self-regulation by reducing prediction error. Historically, this may have seemed reasonable when applied to autistic children and adults with intellectual disability. The current study investigated the restrictiveness and function of focused interests of autistic adults with typical intellectual ability.

To hear from autistic adults themselves, bypassing interviewers' agendas, online discussion posts were analyzed from threads that opened with questions such as What are your special interests? Content analysis was utilized to categorize the special interest topics into a taxonomy (e.g., Academic, Entertainment) and to code for functions, including knowledge seeking (systemizing), mastery, self-regulation, and socializing. Word frequency analyses tallied terms associated with intellectual content and intensity, to evaluate whether interests serve knowledge-seeking vs self-regulation.

Academic topics dominated the interests mentioned, appearing in approximately half of all posts, with psychology-related topics being the most frequent, appearing in 29% of posts. Interests were often highly specific, but were frequently the opposite of restricted. Many posts described a large, diverse range of interests, spanning disparate domains, which was labeled wide-ranging intellectual appetite. Knowledge seeking emerged as the primary function, with 52% of posts containing relevant terms (e.g., learn, read, research). Intellectual approaches to an interest were frequently reported even for non-academic topics like fictional worlds, cooking, pets and true crime. Posts describing the purpose of interests as self-regulation appeared in 9% of posts, career, 6% of posts, and socializing, 4% of posts.

The findings challenge the traditional deficit perspective by demonstrating that focused interests in autistic adults are characterized by knowledge seeking, a construct similar to systemizing, but more explicitly on a continuum with academic interests. These interests are not restricted but wide-ranging, resembling the explorations of polymaths. The established view, that intense interests reduce anxiety by promoting predictability, originated in historical attention to autistic individuals with atypical intellectual ability. Intellectual disability obscured how repetitive behaviors such as object manipulation are 'experiments to see'. I propose that knowledge-seeking is the primary function of systemizing and intense interests, thus unifying focused interests across multiple levels of intellectual ability of the autism spectrum.