Poole Daniel, Grange James A, Milne Elizabeth
Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, UK.
School of Psychology, Keele University, UK.
J Cogn. 2024 May 23;7(1):46. doi: 10.5334/joc.369. eCollection 2024.
Autistic people may have a less focused spotlight of spatial selective attention than non-autistic people, meaning that distracting stimuli are less effectively suppressed. Previous studies using the flanker task have supported this suggestion with observations of increased congruency effects in autistic participants. However, findings across studies have been mixed, mainly based on research in children and on response time measures, which may be influenced by differences in response strategy between autistic and non-autistic people rather than differences in selective attention. In this pre-registered study, 153 autistic and 147 non-autistic adults completed an online flanker task. The aims of this study were to test whether increased congruency effects replicate in autistic adults and to extend previous work by fitting a computational model of spatial selective attention on the flanker task to the data. Congruency effects were increased in the autistic group. The modelling revealed that the interference time from the foils was increased in the autistic group. This suggests that the activation of the foils was increased, meaning suppression was less effective for autistic participants. There were also differences in non-interference parameters between the groups. The estimate of response caution was increased in the autistic group and the estimate of perceptual efficiency was decreased. Together these findings suggest inefficient suppression, response strategy and perceptual processing all contribute to differences in performance on the flanker task between autistic and non-autistic people.
与非自闭症患者相比，自闭症患者在空间选择性注意方面的焦点可能没那么集中，这意味着干扰性刺激难以得到有效抑制。以往使用侧翼任务的研究支持了这一观点，观察发现自闭症参与者的一致性效应增强。然而，各项研究的结果不一，主要基于对儿童的研究以及反应时间测量，而这可能受自闭症和非自闭症患者反应策略差异的影响，而非选择性注意的差异。在这项预先注册的研究中，153名自闭症成年人和147名非自闭症成年人完成了一项在线侧翼任务。本研究的目的是测试自闭症成年人中增强的一致性效应是否会重现，并通过将空间选择性注意的计算模型应用于侧翼任务数据来扩展先前的研究。自闭症组的一致性效应增强。模型显示，自闭症组中来自干扰项的干扰时间增加。这表明干扰项的激活增加，意味着自闭症参与者的抑制效果较差。两组在非干扰参数上也存在差异。自闭症组的反应谨慎度估计值增加，感知效率估计值降低。这些研究结果共同表明，抑制效率低下、反应策略和感知处理都导致了自闭症和非自闭症患者在侧翼任务表现上的差异。
