Thinking, fast and slow on the autism spectrum

I did enjoy reading this article. It is good to see some interesting facets of autism. I laud the researchers for caring and working to create new resources and understanding. However, this article may miss the mark so to speak.

- "...demonstrating the reasoning style in autism is sensitive to context..."

That's kind of the crux of it. Those of us with ASD, generally speaking, never get the context. Context is very often conveyed with nonverbal cues.

- "Within the general population, males typically report higher levels of autistic traits than females..."

This has proven to be problematic due to differences in healthcare availability and masking across many different groups of people. This type of thought propegates images such as the socially awkward smart white male nerd we've seen over and over. This may then cloud diagnosis for those who are not white or male. Cohen, often cited in the paper, has also stated that ASD correlates to an "extreme male brain" which raises many questions.

- "We hypothesised that if intuitive processing was impaired in autism..."

Some folks would argue that they're not impaired - or that their impairment largely stems from the inability of allistics (neurotypicals) to understand autistics. Hence the double empathy problem.

- The sample size for the study was pretty low. About 200 people. The gender split was pretty good, but there was no indication of individuals' backgrounds and locations. The individuals were all about 17 years old and were attending summer school. This is important: the students have already proven they can make it that far in schooling. They are probably considered "high functioning" making them a subset of the autism spectrum.

- "Environments that highlight the explicit nature of what to expect within that context, and that provide suitable time to meet any expectations, would facilitate deliberative processing and be beneficial for autistic individuals."

Uhm... yeah... we kind of already knew that. This kind of approach kind of limits any aid to one type. Individuals may benefit from noise reduction, light reduction, stimming comfortably, more privacy, more autonomy and many more environmental accommodations that might come along with the "needs more time" option.

- "Future research can explore whether individuals on the autism spectrum produce logically accurate responses more rapidly and effortlessly than non-autistic individuals."

Oh? Go on? And why might you be interested in that? Perhaps it's a pepetuation of the autistic superpower myth.

- "Testing was done in group sessions in this study which was not amenable to timing data, so timing to index about intuitive versus deliberative processing was not suitable."

I may not understand what "to index" means. But, it seems to me for research about individuals with autism benefitting from additional time or the lack of time constraints that this is important data. Heck, during a neuropsychological evaluation for ASD many of the exams are time-based!

- "Another limitation is that all the participants were relatively academically able as they were considering going to university..."

There it is.

- "This study highlights for the first time that intuitive and deliberative processing in autism is malleable based on time constraints, comparable to the malleability demonstrated by the control group."

All that work for this?