The effects of reward and frustration on the task performance of autistic children and adolescents

Abstract

BackgroundAutistic individuals often exhibit social communication and socio-emotional styles that may interfere with achieving social and academic outcomes. At a more specific level, they may perform differently in various social and academic tasks due to different modes of processing rewards or unpleasant experiences (e.g., frustrating events). AimThe present experiment examines how rewards and frustration affect the task performance of autistic children and adolescents Methods and proceduresAn affective Posner task was applied to introduce rewards and induce frustration. Forty-four autistic children and adolescents and forty-four typically developing (TD) peers participated in this study Outcomes and resultsResults showed that presenting social and non-social rewards resulted in shorter reaction times and lower error rates in autistic participants, but not in their TD peers. While frustration increased error rates in both autistic and TD individuals, the effect was more pronounced in the autistic group. Conclusions and implicationsSocial and non-social rewards help the performance of autistic children and adolescents, whereas frustration (induced through unpredictable feedback) significantly interferes with their task performance. Therefore, receiving two types of rewards and providing predictable feedback may help to improve interventions designed to optimize task performance for autistic children and adolescents.