Perseveration In Autistic Spectrum Disorders; Role of Negative Feedback

Background:  

Autistic individuals (ASD) have been shown to have executive function deficits in cognitive flexibility, as demonstrated by perseverative behaviour on the Wisconsin Card sorting Task (WCST).   Several authors have argued that the social nature of the WCST administration plays a role in ASD deficit in cognitive flexibility, with improved performance shown when the WCST is administered via computer to this cohort (cf. Ozonoff, 1995).  However, other environmental influences have not been taken into consideration.  It is possible that it is not just the social interaction given by the experimenter alone that increases perseverative behaviour, but the type of feedback given.  There is some evidence to suggest that ASD individuals may be overly persistant with certain behaviour, despite the negative consequences.  For example, Stokes, Newton and Kaur (2007) found that ASD individuals were more likely to pursue a romantic target for longer when you give them negative feedback compared to typically developing individuals.  The authors found that this pursuit continued despite negative feedback from the target or the targets friends and family.  

Objectives:  

While current theories emphasize that autistic individuals are persistent, they do not address the possibility that negative feedback exacerbates their socially inappropriate behaviours.  The purpose of the current study is to determine what influence negative feedback has on perseverative performance on the WCST.

Methods:  

We compared 50 individuals with ASD (age: M=39 years SD=17.34) and 50 typically developing individuals (age: M=26.9 years SD=8.78) for their abilities to successfully complete the Wisconsin Card-Sorting Task under two conditions: (1) traditional WCST containing positive feedback for an correct strategy negative feedback for an incorrect strategy, and (2) Modified WCST containing positive feedback for a correct strategy and no feedback for an incorrect strategy.  

Results:  

The results of the current study found that negative feedback led to perseveration in autistic individuals.  When negative feedback was removed from the WCST (modified version), we found that an ASD individuals’ performance was enhanced, and no different to that of the Typically Developing individuals.  

Conclusions:  

These results suggest that individuals with ASD are able to inhibit incorrect responses and are capable of shifting cognitive sets when they are not presented with negative feedback.  The potential implication of this is that individuals with ASD may be more successful when receiving only positive reinforcement, and this should be taken into account when ASD individuals are learning a new task.  It is also possible that ASD individuals’ poor performance on the WCST does not reflect a deficit in executive function but an inability to attend to, and process, the verbal and social interaction demands of the task in the same way that this is performed in TD individuals.