Abstract
Executive functioning (EF) impairments in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) impact on complex functions, such as social cognition. We assessed this link between EF, attentional cueing, and social cognition with a novel ecological task, “EcoSupermarketX.” Our task had three blocks of increasing executive load and incorporated social and non-social cues, with different degrees of saliency. Performance of ASD and typical neurodevelopment was compared. The ASD showed a significant performance dependence on the presence of contextual cues. Difficulties increased as a function of cognitive load. Between-group differences were found both for social and non-social salient cues. Eye-tracking measures showed significantly larger fixation time of more salient social cues in ASD. In sum, EcoSupermarketX is sensitive to detect EF and attentional cueing deficits in ASD.
Highlights
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder defined by deficits in social communication and interaction, as well as repetitive patterns of behavior and restricted interests (American Psychiatric Association, 2013)
The general executive dysfunction hypothesis is the basis of one of these models, which suggests that complex behavioral manifestations of ASD are consequences of impaired executive processing, with empirical studies suggesting a broad impairment in executive functions (EFs) with a significant inter-individual variability (Pennington and Ozonoff, 1996; Hill, 2004a)
To achieve the primary goal to investigate the link between EF and social cognition and the secondary goal, namely investigating the influence of social/non-social contextual cueing, we developed a task at our Lab, EcoSupermarketX, a non-immersive virtual reality task, monitored with eye-tracking, featuring a shopping task at a supermarket
Summary
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder defined by deficits in social communication and interaction, as well as repetitive patterns of behavior and restricted interests (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Part of the studies in the existing literature have used archival clinical data without control groups to confirm the link between EF and ASD symptomology (Pugliese et al, 2016; White et al, 2017) These executive deficits need to be accurately identified and clinically assessed as they can have a significant impact on the quality of life and the daily functioning of individuals with ASD (Kapp, 2018). Such ecological contexts provide an opportunity to test the role of (social/non-social) contextual cueing in EF tasks. We hypothesized that the subjects with ASD will show more errors, longer time, and wider distance in the EcoSupermarketX task, and deficits in attentional contextual cueing, compared to TD, and this would be associated with ASD symptom severity and with impaired EF in classical neuropsychological assessments
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