ArticleJournal of cognition2024
Putting the Spotlight Back Onto the Flanker Task in Autism: Autistic Adults Show Increased Interference from Foils Compared with Non-autistic Adults.
Article in Journal of cognition, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Autistic and non-autistic children's perceptual decision-making in visual orientation and motion tasks and the effect of task instructions.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- Autism-associated learning patterns show reduced credit assignment to outcome-irrelevant features.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Inefficient and unique processing of social-emotional interference in school-aged children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
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.
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