Thinking, Reasoning, and Decision Making in Autism

Kinga Morsanyi, Ruth M.J. Byrne, Kinga Morsanyi, Ruth M.J. Byrne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351060899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

Thinking and Reasoning in Autism provides fresh insights into the cognitive processes that underlie some of the typical characteristics of autism. Autism has long been considered an enigma, and no single theory so far has been able to explain, or even fully describe, the key characteristics of the autistic mind. From the interdisciplinary perspective of new research in cognitive psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and neuroscience, this book explores thinking, reasoning and decision making in autism.

The new cognitive approaches challenge some of the existing assumptions of the nature of thought in autism, including presumed areas of impairments. Instead, this book focuses on the nuanced array of cognitive signatures that characterize the autistic mind, and in many cases it reveals the possibility of intact performance alongside instances of remarkably enhanced thinking. The book considers the implications of these characteristics, providing in-depth analyses of specific areas of cognitive functioning, and their everyday manifestations.

Featuring contributions from world-leading researchers from the fields of cognitive science and autism research, this volume will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers, as well as those working with individuals with autism spectrum disorders.

1

How do individuals with autism think?

Kinga Morsanyi and Ruth M.J. Byrne

New cognitive approaches to autism

Contemporary research on human reasoning, decision-making, and imaginative thought is undergoing an exciting transformation. After many decades of detailed study focused on a rigorous examination of how typical individuals think, a growing body of research is now emerging that attempts to translate core discoveries about thinking and reasoning in the typical human mind to understand in more depth the minds of atypical individuals. Chief among these illuminating explorations has been research that examines thinking in individuals with autism, and those who have autistic-like traits. Discoveries by cognitive psychologists, linguists, philosophers, and neuroscientists have provided a new interdisciplinary perspective on a rich and diverse array of evidence about thinking in individuals with autism. These new cognitive approaches to autism present some challenges to existing characterizations of the nature of thought in individuals with autism. They demonstrate a nuanced array of cognitive signatures in thinking, which reach beyond the usual conceptualization of impairment to reveal not only intact performance in some circumstances but also instances of remarkably enhanced thinking. The currently emerging picture of thinking in individuals with autism is more complex, subtle, and intriguing than previously envisaged.

As a consequence of the reconceptualization of the cognitive profile of individuals with autism, there have also been changes in the way autism is defined and diagnosed. Autism is characterized by difficulties in social communication and interaction, and by repetitive and stereotyped behavior, interests, and activities, which are present from early childhood, and limit or impair everyday functioning (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). A notable recent change in the definition of autism in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 2013 is the introduction of the collective term “Autism Spectrum Disorder,” which combines the previous diagnostic categories of autistic disorder, Asperger disorder, childhood disintegrative disorder, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder, and highlights that all individuals with autism share certain cognitive and behavioral characteristics. An equally significant change is the introduction of specifiers, such as whether the person has language difficulties or intellectual impairments, which makes it clear that although these features often co-occur with autism, they are not an integral part of it. A greater public awareness of autism has also led to a steady increase in diagnosis rates; for example 1 in 150 children in the US in 2000 had a diagnosis of autism, whereas this rate had increased to 1 in 59 in 2016.¹ There is also a greater awareness that autism can affect people with high intellectual ability, and that it is not only present among boys and men but also in girls and women.

The new cognitive approaches to thinking in autism represented in this collection of chapters will be of relevance to students, researchers, and educators interested in autism from a wide range of disciplines. Most chapters offer insight into the everyday cognitive functioning of individuals with high-functioning autism. So they will also be of relevance to anyone with an interest in understanding more about how individuals with autism fare in making daily decisions, such as when to get up in the morning, or when to take risks. The chapters also offer insight into more complex thinking processes, such as understanding analogies, or imagining alternatives to reality. The chapters will also engage anyone who wishes to find out how individuals with autism manage pragmatic communication, such as in a job interview, or how well they incorporate background knowledge in hypothetical reasoning. The consideration of these everyday implications makes the chapters of relevance also for clinicians, as well as members of the general public with an interest in autism, including individuals with autism themselves and their families. In this introductory chapter, we first sketch some highlights of the experimental evidence on decision making, imagination, and reasoning in individuals with autism included in the book, and then we consider some of their implications for theoretical explanations of the cognitive processes that give rise to the subtle and nuanced patterns of similarities and differences, impairments, and enhancements. We finish by considering some future issues in the study of thinking in individuals with autism.

Evidence on decision-making, imagination, and reasoning in individuals with autism

The contributors to this book address issues about thinking in individuals with high-functioning autism that we can group into three broad research questions: How do individuals with autism make decisions? Do they engage in analogical and imaginative thought? Can they incorporate pragmatic knowledge in communication and inference? We consider each of these questions in turn.

How do individuals with autism make decisions?

When individuals with autism make decisions, do they tend to engage in careful deliberative reflection, or do they rely on quick, immediate intuitions? Many studies of thinking in typical individuals have shown that people appear to make a decision initially on the basis of heuristics, that is, seemingly effortless “rules of thumb,” but they can also engage in a slower and more effortful process of deliberative reflection, which sometimes results in a different decision (e.g., Evans & Over, 1996; Kahneman, 2011). It is a contentious issue among thinking researchers whether these tendencies reflect two entirely different types of thought, or whether they arise from a single type of thought at different points in its operation (for a review, see Evans & Stanovich, 2013). Even among researchers who consider that there are “dual processes,” there is debate about how best to characterize them, for example, whether intuitive processes are always fast and incorrect and deliberative processes are always slow and correct, as well as questions about how conflict between intuition and deliberation is detected (e.g., De Neys, 2014; Pennycook, De Neys, Evans, Stanovich, & Thompson, 2018; Trippas, Thompson, & Handley, 2017).

In Chapter 2, Chris Ashwin and Mark Brosnan suggest that individuals with autism tend not to be “lazy thinkers” and instead tend to rely on deliberative reflection. They review evidence that adults with autism are less susceptible to producing intuitive responses in decision-making and logical reasoning. For example, on the cognitive reflection test, which includes items such as “if a bat and a ball cost 1 dollar and 10 cents and the bat costs 1 dollar more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?” adults with autism tend not to give the typical – and incorrect – intuitive answer that the ball costs 10 cents. Another example is that individuals with autism are less likely to “jump to conclusions,” that is, to make decisions without considering sufficient evidence. For example, participants were shown two jars of beads, one with mostly white beads and very few black beads, and the other with the opposite proportion. Then the jars were hidden and beads were drawn one at a time from one of them. Individuals with autism tended to require about 10 beads before they made a decision about which jar they were drawn from, whereas typical individuals made a decision much sooner. Ashwin and Brosnan highlight some of the potential everyday consequences of a more deliberative sort of thinking, including some negative consequences. For example, in a job interview, answering questions after long deliberation might create the incorrect impression that an individual with autism is not adequately prepared.

Do individuals with autism find it easy to make decisions, and do they make risky choices more or less often than typical individuals? Irwin Levin, Gary Gaeth, Aron Levin, and Eleanor Burke highlight in Chapter 3 that adults with autism report that they find it difficult to make everyday decisions – such as deciding what clothes to wear or what food to eat – and more so than typical individuals, but this difference does not occur for major life decisions, such as who to marry or where to work. An individual’s tendency to take risks can vary depending on the domain; for example, an individual’s inclination to take financial risks might not be the same as their inclination to take health risks – or social, recreational or ethical risks (e.g., Blais & Weber, 2006). A smoker does not necessarily want to try skydiving. Adults with autism tend to report that they would not be willing to take risks, more often than typical individuals, when they fall within the social domain, such as moving to a city far away from their family. But they report they would be willing to take other sorts of risks, such as those that fall within the ethical domain, e.g., passing off somebody else’s work as their own, perhaps because they miscalculate the frequency of such behavior in the general population. Despite these differences, their risky choices, just like the risky choices of typical individuals, are influenced by whether the choices are framed as potentially leading to a loss or a gain. They are risk averse when choices are framed as gains, that is, they show a preference for a certain outcome rather than a risky one, but they are risk seeking when the choices are framed as losses, that is, they show a preference for a risky outcome rather than a certain one (see Tversky & Kahneman, 1981). Nevertheless, their difficulties with everyday consumer decisions frequently result in losses for them; for example, they show a greater tendency to purchase goods that go unused and to accumulate greater consumer debt. Another practical difference is that individuals with autism are more persuaded to purchase a product by advertisements that demonstrate the product in a setting in which a person is on their own, rather than one in a social setting with several people.

The discoveries outlined in these two chapters raise important questions about whether differences in the decisions made by adults with autism – and adults with autistic-like traits – compared to typical individuals reflect differences in thinking abilities and skills, or differences in thinking styles. They also raise questions about whether such differences are always disadvantageous, or whether they may sometimes be advantageous, for example, in deliberative reflection. Perhaps surprisingly, they also show many circumstances in which the decision-making of adults with autism and typical individuals is the same.

Do individuals with autism engage in analogical and imaginative thinking?

Can individuals with autism think analogically? Analogical thinking is often considered to be the backbone of creative discovery and flexible thought, whereby individuals gain insight into an unknown domain by thinking about what they know about an entirely unrelated domain; for example, “a fraction is like slices of pizza” (e.g., Holyoak & Thagard, 1995; Keane, Ledgeway, & Duff, 1994). Analogies require cognitive flexibility to transfer knowledge from a known context into an unknown one to solve novel problems (e.g., Gick & Holyoak, 1980). Analogical thinkers must find coherent correspondences between disparate situations, focusing on the higher-level relations between them rather than their specific, literal features. Given these characteristics, it might be expected that individuals with autism would struggle with analogical thinking. In Chapter 4, Kinga Morsanyi, Dušan Stamenković, and Keith Holyoak show that, on the contrary, striking similarities are observed between individuals with autism and typical individuals in their abilities to engage in analogical thought. Morsanyi and her colleagues address the contradictory claims in earlier studies about whether or not individuals with autism and typical individuals think about analogies differently. They report a systematic review of the literature in which they identified 12 studies, with over 600 participants, which compared adults and children with autism to typically developing participants who were matched carefully on age and intellectual ability. The studies examined pictorial analogies and Raven’s matrices – a visuo-spatial task that requires participants to solve analogies based on two-dimensional geometric figures. Morsanyi and her colleagues performed a meta-analysis that showed that individuals with autism did not differ from typical individuals in their analogical ability for pictorial analogies and Raven’s matrices overall. For Raven’s matrices, individuals with autism even showed better performance than typical individuals.

Do individuals with autism engage in everyday imaginative thinking about “if only” and “what if,” just as typical individuals do? Typical individuals frequently create counterfactual alternatives to reality about how things could have been different, such as “If only I hadn’t let the dog in from the garden with muddy paws, the kitchen floor would be clean.” They create alternatives to reality to explain or excuse a past outcome and to form intentions to prevent a similar bad outcome in the future, and their counterfactual thoughts amplify emotional experiences such as regret, and moral judgments such as blame (e.g., Byrne, 2016; Roese & Epstude, 2017). Counterfactual thinking requires simulation skills, to construct a model of an episode that actually happened, and to create a model of how the episode could have been different (e.g., Byrne, 2005). It depends on executive function skills, including working memory resources to enable the comparison of multiple possibilities, inhibitory control skills to inhibit a representation of reality, and attention switching skills to enable flexible updating of each model (e.g., Beck, Riggs, & Gorniak, 2009). Célia Rasga, Cristina Quelhas, and Ruth Byrne in Chapter 5 present evidence that children with autism make fewer correct counterfactual inferences than typically developing children, and they create different sorts of alternatives to reality. Rasga and her colleagues consider that the ability to think about the facts of an episode and to imagine how they could have been different is a crucial precursor to the ability to understand that someone else may have a different belief about the facts of an episode, even an incorrect belief. Counterfactual thinking emerges before false-belief understanding, and the two are strongly related, in typically developing children and in children with autism. The relation between counterfactual and false-belief reasoning is strong not only in change-of-location tasks about the physical world, in which an object is moved unbeknownst to an observer, but even in change-of-intentions tasks about the mental world, in which an individual’s original reason for an action changes unbeknownst to an observer. Although children with autism show a developmental delay of several years in their abilities to make such inferences, the shape of their development is similar to typical children: they make accurate counterfactual inferences before they can make accurate false-belief ones.

The discoveries sketched in Chapters 4 and 5 cast a new light on the creative and imaginative skills of children and adults with autism. Their analogical thinking skills for pictorial and geometric analogies are the same or even better than those of typical individuals. Their imaginative skills for creating alternatives to reality – to imagine how an event could have turned out differently or to imagine another person’s beliefs about an event – show important similarities in the emergence of the former before the latter. These findings challenge conjectures about a lack of creativity in individuals with autism and suggest instead that they have a rich imaginative mental life, just like typical individuals.

Can individuals with autism make pragmatic and logical inferences?

Do individuals with autism understand the pragmatics of communication? For example, when someone asks, “Can you close the window?” it sounds like they are asking a question, but...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 How do individuals with autism think?
• 2 The Dual Process Theory of Autism
• 3 Decision-making processes of high-functioning adults on the autism spectrum
• 4 Analogical reasoning in autismA systematic review and meta-analysis
• 5 Counterfactual and false-belief reasoning in individuals with autism
• 6 Pragmatic reasoning in autism
• 7 Reasoning and discourse coherence in Autism Spectrum Disorder
• Index