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. 2022 Dec;15(12):2296-2309.
doi: 10.1002/aur.2828. Epub 2022 Oct 4.

Cognitive flexibility in autism: Evidence from young autistic children

Maria Andreou  1 , Kostas Konstantopoulos  1 , Eleni Peristeri  2
Affiliations

Cognitive flexibility in autism: Evidence from young autistic children

Maria Andreou et al. Autism Res. 2022 Dec.

Abstract

We examined the cognitive flexibility performance of young autistic children and a group of neurotypical peers. Thirty-six autistic children (72-83 months) and 200 age-matched typically-developing children were assessed on the Children's Color Trails Test (CCTT), a semantic and a phonemic verbal fluency task. The results showed that the autistic children performed worse than their neurotypical peers in the switching component of the CCTT. In the fluency tests, the autistic group generated overall fewer word items than their neurotypical peers, however, their poorer performance was driven by specific linguistic stimuli in the fluency tasks. The findings suggest that cognitive flexibility for the autistic children was affected in the nonverbal CCTT only, while poor performance in semantic and phonemic fluency seemed to be inherent to the language properties of the verbal fluency tasks.

Keywords: autism; children's color trails test; cognitive flexibility; fluency.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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