Autistic interests: wide-ranging and intellectually oriented.

Introduction: The interests of autistic individuals have traditionally been described as circumscribed and restricted, serving the functions of self-regulation by reducing prediction error. Historically, this may have seemed reasonable when applied to autistic children and adults with intellectual disability. The current study investigated the restrictiveness and function of focused interests of autistic adults with typical intellectual ability. Methods: To hear from autistic adults themselves, bypassing interviewers' agendas, online discussion posts were analyzed from threads that opened with questions such as Results: Academic topics dominated the interests mentioned, appearing in approximately half of all posts, with psychology-related topics being the most frequent, appearing in 29% of posts. Interests were often highly specific, but were frequently the opposite of restricted. Many posts described a large, diverse range of interests, spanning disparate domains, which was labeled Discussion: The findings challenge the traditional deficit perspective by demonstrating that focused interests in autistic adults are characterized by knowledge seeking, a construct similar to systemizing, but more explicitly on a continuum with academic interests. These interests are not restricted but wide-ranging, resembling the explorations of polymaths. The established view, that intense interests reduce anxiety by promoting predictability, originated in historical attention to autistic individuals with atypical intellectual ability. Intellectual disability obscured how repetitive behaviors such as object manipulation are 'experiments to see'. I propose that knowledge-seeking is the primary function of systemizing and intense interests, thus unifying focused interests across multiple levels of intellectual ability of the autism spectrum.