Essays on decision making by children and adults on the autistic spectrum
Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis presents three essays on decision making by autistic individuals. \nIn the first chapter we draw on the studies germane to decision making and \nautism to provide an extensive review focused on such crucial aspects as mentalizing, \ndecision making under risk and uncertainty, learning in Autistic Spectrum Disorders \n(social learning; reinforcement learning), time (concept of time; intertemporal choice) \nand counterfactual emotions. The review is followed by two related experimental \nstudies with patient population: 'E ects of Counterfactual Emotions on Decision \nMaking of Individuals on the Upper End of the Autistic Spectrum' and 'Insights \non Counterfactual Emotions of Autistic Individuals within Social Contexts'. \nThere is a big array of feelings and counterfactual emotions which could result from \nassessing the outcome of social comparisons against ourselves and/or others. How \ndo the individuals with autistic spectrum disorders process counterfactual emotions? \nAre they able to experience regret and relief, disappointment and joy? Are they able \nto account for these emotions? Do they process them the same way as the individuals \nwith typical development? What do individuals on the autistic spectrum feel when \ncomparing themselves to other people in a social context? And how do they process \nthese social comparison emotions? \nWe inquire into the behavioral and skin conductance responses within an autistic patient \ngroup and a typical development (TD) control group matched demographically, \neducationally and IQ-wise. We employ a gambling task to look into the participants' \nchoices along with their subjective reports on the labeling of the emotion felt and \nintensity of their feelings. We learned that while the TD controls experienced regret \nmore intensely than disappointment, there was not significant difference in the intensity \nof these two emotions for the ASD patients in our first experiment. \nStrikingly, in the private conditions the ASD patients accounted for weaker regret as \ncompared to the TD controls, but increased shared regret associated with very positive \nfeelings in the social condition. Still, in a social context appraisal, the subjective \naccounts in participants with ASD are not different from those of TD controls', implying \npreserved social feelings in the context of social comparison for the autistic \nindividuals. Surprisingly, skin conductance responses mainly contradicted the subjective \nself-reports, showing more intense activity in the condition eliciting regret or \nrelief, and less intense responses in the social context condition. Hence our results \nendorse the fact that individuals with ASD experience disruptive emotion processing \nand fail to fully integrate cognitive input and intrinsic information during decision \nmaking.
Author: Ana Balatel
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1560349767