Deakin Child Study Centre, School of Psychology, Deakin University, 221 Burwood Hwy, Burwood, Geelong, VIC, 3125, Australia.
Centre for Adolescent Health, Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2018 Jul;48(7):2506-2515. doi: 10.1007/s10803-018-3503-3.
Deficits in cognitive flexibility are thought to underpin the core symptom of repetitive and restricted patterns of behaviour in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Studies investigating this relationship, however, report inconsistent results. This is partly due to the variable nature of measures used to assess the construct of flexibility. The main purpose of this study was to investigate whether ASD traits differentially predict cognitive flexibility performance on lab-based neurocognitive measures relative to behavioural self-reports in a non-clinical sample of young adults. Our results indicate that ASD traits exclusively predict performance on behavioural self-reports of cognitive flexibility. These findings highlight the possibility that behavioural self-reports are a better index than lab-based neurocognitive measures to capture cognitive flexibility impairments in individuals with ASD.
认知灵活性缺陷被认为是自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）中重复和受限行为模式的核心症状的基础。然而，研究这一关系的报告结果并不一致。这在一定程度上是由于用于评估灵活性结构的测量方法具有多变性。本研究的主要目的是在非临床的年轻成人样本中，调查 ASD 特征是否相对于行为自我报告，能更准确地预测基于实验室的神经认知测量中认知灵活性的表现。我们的研究结果表明，ASD 特征仅能预测行为自我报告的认知灵活性表现。这些发现突出了行为自我报告可能是比基于实验室的神经认知测量更好的指标，可以更准确地捕捉 ASD 个体的认知灵活性障碍。
