Spontaneous instrumental approach-avoidance learning in social contexts in autism

Abstract

Background: Individuals with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) are characterized by atypicalities in social interactions, compared to Typically Developing individuals (TD). The social motivation theory posits that these difficulties stem from diminished anticipation, reception, and/or learning from social rewards. Although learning from socioemotional outcomes is core to the theory, studies to date have been sparse and inconsistent. This possibly arises from a combination of theoretical, methodological and sample-related issues. Here, we assessed participants' ability to develop a spontaneous preference for actions that lead to desirable socioemotional outcomes (approaching/avoiding of happy/angry individuals, respectively), in an ecologically valid social scenario. We expected that learning abilities would be impaired in ASC individuals, particularly in response to affiliative social feedback.

Method: We ran an online social reinforcement learning task, on two large online cohorts with (n = 274) and without (n = 290) ASC, matched for gender, age and education. Participants had to indicate where they would sit in a waiting room. Each seat was associated with different probabilities of approaching/avoiding emotional individuals. Importantly, the task was implicit, as participants were not instructed to learn, and emotional expressions were never mentioned. We applied both categorical analyses contrasting the ASC and TD groups and dimensional factor analysis on affective questionnaires.

Results: Contrary to our hypothesis, participants showed spontaneous learning from socioemotional outcomes, regardless of their diagnostic group. Yet, when accounting for dimensional variations in autistic traits, as well as depression and anxiety, two main findings emerged among females who failed to develop explicit learning strategies: (1) autism severity in ASC correlated with reduced learning to approach happy individuals; (2) anxiety-depression severity across both ASC and TD participants correlated with reduced learning to approach/avoid happy/angry individuals, respectively.

Conclusions: Implicit spontaneous learning from socioemotional outcomes is not generally impaired in autism but may be specifically associated with autism severity in females with ASC, when they do not have an explicit strategy for adapting to their social environment. Clinical diagnosis and intervention ought to take into account individual differences in their full complexity, including the presence of co-morbid anxiety and depression, when dealing with social atypicalities in autism.

Keywords: Approach/avoidance; Autism; Emotional expressions; Gender bias; Social reinforcement learning.

Fig. 1

Experimental design. Participants performed a reinforcement learning task in which they indicated their preference for a free chair by pressing a left/right button. During the feedback phase, they could find themselves either far from (avoidance) or close to (approach) an individual displaying an emotional expression (either happy for HFT or angry for AFT). The feedback was determined by a hidden probability associated with each chair. The figure illustrates an example trial in which the participant pressed the left button, resulting in the desired outcome for each version of the task: avoiding the angry individual or approaching the happy individual

Fig. 2

Summary of behavioural results from the categorical approach. Thick-contour dots represent means, while error bars represent 95% confidence intervals for the normal distribution. Shaded points represent individual participant means. A: Mean proportion of hits across the task, as a function of participant strategy and gender. B: Mean proportion of hits over the first 20 trials across blocks of stable action-outcome contingencies (trial 1 = reversal trial). The fitted curve represents the best fit (and 95% confidence interval) for the hyperbolic function y = 1–1/(1 + x) previously used in Mennella et al. (2022) and confirms the results for the mean proportion of hits (A). C & D: Mean proportion of action repetitions following either approach or avoidance outcomes in the angry and happy versions of the reinforcement learning task, as a function of participant strategy (C) and gender (D). Symbols: p < 0.001 ***; p < 0.01 **, p < 0.05 *, p < 0.1 ~

Fig. 3

Summary of behavioural results from the dimensional approach. A: For ASC participants who did not develop an explicit learning strategy, Pearson correlations between mean proportion of hits and the Fa1-Autistic traits, as a function of Angry or Happy feedback and participant gender. B: In the Happy feedback task, Pearson correlations between the mean proportion of hits and the Fa2-Anxiety-Depression score, as a function of participant strategy and gender. C: Mean Fa1-Autistic traits as a function of participant condition and gender. D: Mean Fa2-Anxiety-Depression score in the angry and happy versions of the reinforcement learning task, as a function of participant’s condition and gender. Same convention as Fig. 2

Fig. 4

Results of the subjective evaluation task. Thick-contour dots represent means, while error bars represent 95% confidence intervals for the normal distribution. Shaded points represent individual participant means. A: Mean subjective evaluation of approach and avoidance feedback in the Angry feedback task, as a function of participant condition and gender. B: Mean subjective evaluation of approach and avoidance feedback in the Angry feedback task, as a function of participant strategy and condition. C: Mean subjective evaluation of approach and avoidance feedback in the Happy feedback task, as a function of participant strategy. Same convention as Fig. 2