figshare
Browse

An examination of perseverative errors and cognitive flexibility in autism

Download (995.96 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2021-04-12, 04:21 authored by Oriane Landry, P Mitchell
Perseveration is a well-replicated finding in autism. The aim of this study was to examine how the context of the task influences performance with respect to this phenomenon. We randomly assigned 137 children aged 6–12 with and without autism to complete a modified card-sorting task under one of two conditions: Children were either told the sorting rules on each trial (Explicit), or were given feedback to formulate the rules themselves (Implicit). While performance was enhanced on the Explicit condition for participants without autism, the participants with autism were disadvantaged by this manipulation. In contrast, there were few differences in performance between groups on the Implicit condition. Exploratory analyses were used to examine this unexpected result; increased autism symptomology was associated with poorer performance.

Funding

Funding for this project was provided by ESRC (UK) grant #RES-000-22-1563 to PM. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

History

Publication Date

2021-01-13

Journal

PLoS ONE

Volume

16

Issue

1

Article Number

e0223160

Pagination

19pp.

Publisher

PLOS ONE

ISSN

1932-6203

Rights Statement

The Author reserves all moral rights over the deposited text and must be credited if any re-use occurs. Documents deposited in OPAL are the Open Access versions of outputs published elsewhere. Changes resulting from the publishing process may therefore not be reflected in this document. The final published version may be obtained via the publisher’s DOI. Please note that additional copyright and access restrictions may apply to the published version.