1Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam (UvA), The Netherlands.
Autism. 2014 May;18(4):409-18. doi: 10.1177/1362361313477919. Epub 2013 Sep 26.
Repetitive behavior is a key characteristic of autism spectrum disorders. Our aim was to investigate the hypothesis that this abnormal behavioral repetition results from a tendency to over-rely on habits at the expense of flexible, goal-directed action. Twenty-four children with autism spectrum disorders and 24 age- and gender-matched controls (8-12 years) initially learned to give specific responses to different pictorial stimuli in order to gain valuable outcomes. Subsequently, in the "slips-of-action" test, some of these outcomes were no longer valuable. Children needed to refrain from responding when stimuli were shown that signaled the availability of those outcomes while continuing to respond for the still-valuable outcomes. Reliance on habits should lead to "slips of action" toward no longer valuable outcomes. Therefore, the children's ability to respond selectively for still-valuable outcomes provides a measure of relative habitual versus goal-directed control. Two additional tasks were included to control for general task characteristics (i.e. working memory and inhibition). Children with autism spectrum disorders learned equally well as controls and were not impaired at flexibly adjusting their behavior to devaluation of the outcomes or stimuli. We found no evidence for a disruption in the balance between goal-directed and habitual behavioral control in children with autism spectrum disorders.
重复行为是自闭症谱系障碍的一个关键特征。我们的目的是验证这样一个假设，即这种异常的行为重复是由于过度依赖习惯而不是灵活的、目标导向的行为。我们让 24 名自闭症谱系障碍儿童和 24 名年龄和性别匹配的对照组儿童（8-12 岁）最初学习对不同的图片刺激做出特定的反应，以获得有价值的结果。随后，在“动作失误”测试中，这些结果中的一些不再有价值。当出现表示这些结果不再可用的刺激时，儿童需要避免做出反应，同时继续对仍然有价值的结果做出反应。依赖习惯应该会导致对不再有价值的结果的“动作失误”。因此，儿童选择性地对仍然有价值的结果做出反应的能力提供了一种衡量相对习惯和目标导向控制的方法。我们还包括了另外两个任务来控制一般任务特征（即工作记忆和抑制）。自闭症谱系障碍儿童与对照组儿童一样能够很好地学习，并且在调整行为以适应结果或刺激的贬值方面没有受到损害。我们没有发现自闭症谱系障碍儿童在目标导向和习惯行为控制之间的平衡受到干扰的证据。
