Farmer George D, Baron-Cohen Simon, Skylark William J
Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge.
Psychol Sci. 2017 Aug;28(8):1067-1076. doi: 10.1177/0956797617694867. Epub 2017 Jun 21.
People with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) show reduced sensitivity to contextual stimuli in many perceptual and cognitive tasks. We investigated whether this also applies to decision making by examining adult participants' choices between pairs of consumer products that were presented with a third, less desirable "decoy" option. Participants' preferences between the items in a given pair frequently switched when the third item in the set was changed, but this tendency was reduced among individuals with ASC, which indicated that their choices were more consistent and conventionally rational than those of control participants. A comparison of people who were drawn from the general population and who varied in their levels of autistic traits revealed a weaker version of the same effect. The reduced context sensitivity was not due to differences in noisy responding, and although the ASC group took longer to make their decisions, this did not account for the enhanced consistency of their choices. The results extend the characterization of autistic cognition as relatively context insensitive to a new domain, and have practical implications for socioeconomic behavior.
患有自闭症谱系障碍（ASC）的人在许多感知和认知任务中对情境刺激的敏感度较低。我们通过研究成年参与者在成对的消费产品之间的选择来调查这是否也适用于决策，这些产品还会呈现出第三个不太吸引人的“诱饵”选项。当集合中的第三个项目发生变化时，参与者在给定对中的项目之间的偏好经常会改变，但这种倾向在患有ASC的个体中有所降低，这表明他们的选择比对照组参与者更一致且更符合传统理性。对来自普通人群且自闭症特征水平不同的人进行比较，发现了相同效应的较弱版本。情境敏感度降低并非由于嘈杂反应的差异，并且尽管ASC组做出决策花费的时间更长，但这并不能解释他们选择的一致性增强。这些结果将自闭症认知相对情境不敏感的特征扩展到了一个新领域，并对社会经济行为具有实际意义。
