Cognitive flexibility in autism: Evidence from young autistic children.
Maria Andreou, Kostas Konstantopoulos, Eleni Peristeri
PMID 36193816WHAT IT FOUND
Young autistic children took longer and made more errors on a non-verbal task requiring them to switch rules between numbers and colors.
Their performance on verbal word-list tasks was lower, but this was driven by specific word categories rather than a general inability to switch mental sets.
Key findings
01Autistic children required more time to complete the rule-switching version of the Color Trails Test compared to typically developing peers.
02Autistic children made significantly more color errors on the rule-switching task than their typically developing peers.
03Verbal fluency deficits in autistic children were specific to the 'objects' category and the letter 'X', suggesting language and stimulus features influenced performance more than general cognitive flexibility.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTsWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample of autistic children was small (n=36), which may limit the statistical power and generalizability of the findings. The study did not measure background language abilities (such as vocabulary size), so it is unclear if fluency deficits were due to executive function or language knowledge. The groups were matched on IQ, but the autistic children had not received speech and language therapy, which might affect how their results generalize to treated populations.
Declared interests
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that poor performance on verbal fluency tasks indicates a general cognitive flexibility deficit. The study found that autistic children's verbal fluency issues were specific to certain word categories (objects) and letters (X), suggesting that language and stimulus characteristics, not just executive function, drove the lower scores.