Autistic children sample costly information with increased variability due to inflexible updating.
Efficient information sampling is crucial for human inference and decision-making even for young children. It is also closely associated with the core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), since both the social interaction difficulties and repetitive behaviors suggest that autistic people may...
| Publicado en: | Communications Psychology Vol. 4; no. 1; pp. 1 - 14 |
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| Autores principales: | , , |
| Formato: | equations & formulas pictorial research tables/charts Journal Article |
| Publicado: |
Springer Nature
3/20/2026
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ccm&AN=193684710&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ccm uiTerm: 193684710 longDbName: CINAHL Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: dissinfo: jinfo: jid: 27319121 N51Q jtl: Communications Psychology issn: 27319121 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: 3/20/2026 vid: 4 iid: 1 pid: 237 pub: Springer Nature place: New York, New York artinfo: ui: 193684710 193684710 193684710 10.1038/s44271-026-00439-2 193684710 ppf: 1 ppct: 13 formats: tig: atl: Autistic children sample costly information with increased variability due to inflexible updating. aug: au: Lu, Haoyang Zhang, Hang Yi, Li affil: https://ror.org/02v51f717 School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, Beijing, China sug: subj: Autism Spectrum Disorder Psychosocial Factors Children with Disabilities Psychosocial Factors Cognitive Flexibility Decision Making Task Performance and Analysis Child Development Human Child Comparative Studies Descriptive Statistics Data Analysis Software Post Hoc Analysis Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient Models, Statistical Questionnaires Models, Psychological Child Psychology Cognition Funding Source Child: 6-12 years ab: Efficient information sampling is crucial for human inference and decision-making even for young children. It is also closely associated with the core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), since both the social interaction difficulties and repetitive behaviors suggest that autistic people may sample information from the environment distinctively. However, the specific ways in which autistic children sample information, especially when facing explicit costs and adapting to environmental changes, remain unclear. Thirty-two autistic and 41 IQ-matched neurotypical children aged five to eight participated in a computerized bead task, where children decided to gather samples sequentially from an unknown target to infer which of the two options was the target. Autistic children showed lower sampling efficiency under costly conditions compared to neurotypical peers, resulting from increased variability in sample numbers across trials, rather than solely systematic sampling bias. Computational models indicated that while both groups shared a similar decision process, autistic children's sampling decisions were less influenced by dynamic changes and more by recently gathered evidence. This led to higher sampling variation and lowered the efficiency of autistic children. These findings offer valuable insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying fundamental behaviors in autistic children. Information sampling is linked to core autism symptoms. Using computational models in a costly sampling task, this study shows autistic children rely less on cumulative and historical information, resulting in variable sampling and lower efficiency. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: equations & formulas pictorial research tables/charts Journal Article ougenre: Article language: English refInfo: holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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