The Effect Of Switch Cost On Cognitive Flexibility In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Individuals with ASD have trouble adapting to variable demands of the environment,show rigid behavior,hold on to previous behavior patterns,and show difficulty in adapting to changing plans or alterations of their routine in daily life.This restricted and repetitive behavior seems to be closely related to,or even an expression of impairment of cognitive flexibility.Although cognitive flexibility deficits in everyday life seem evident,the empirical laboratory data is not convincing.This inconsistency might be a result of the overlap of different executive functions the difference of the stimulate materials,epically between the social materials and the unsocial materials,and the diversity of the subjects.This research selected 22 autistic children and typically developing children respectively aged from three to seven years,and used eye-tracking technology to collect eye movement date in time and area,which the subjects were looking at the pictures in the visual habituation program,so that we could understand the characteristics of switching of ASDs in switching task,and in further,explore whether same method such as cues availability and familiarity could decrease the switch cost and help ASDs in task-switching or not.Research 1 contained three experiments.Experiment 1 investigated the eye movement characteristics of children with ASD on simple geometric figures;Experiment 2 compared the differences of ability of habituation between ASDs and TDs with classic visual habituation pregame.On the basis of experiment 1and 2,experiment 3 investigated the performance of children with ASD in habituation when different number rules changed.Research 2 included experiment 4 and 5.Experiment 4 explored the effectiveness,which availability of switch cues could decrease switch cost and help ASDs re-habituate quickly.Experiment 5 explored whether the practicing and familiarity could help ASDs and typically developing controls perform well in visual habituation pregame.Results showed,(1)as normal children,children with ASD could also pay attention to simple geometric figures;there is no significant difference in the watching processing ability of the two;(2)Individuals with ASD performed equally well on the control measures in habituation,but ASD took less time in attention than TDs;(3)In two changing rules,ASDs took more times to watch repeat pictures,had a higher switch cost than in one changing rule and hardly hatibuate,while TDs preformed same in the two situations;(4)Available switch cue slow down the speed of re-habituation of TD children,but accelerated the speed of ASD children;(5)Both of two groups of subjects speeded up in re-habituation with the help from familiarity.As a conclusion,there were no defects in ability of habituation in ASD children.But they could not complete the hard switching task as well as typically developing children.It was shown that flexibility deficits in ASD.Some methods,such as switch cues availability and familiar background could effectively decrease the switch costs of ASD children and help them adopt the need of environment and tasks better.