This difference may help explain why some autistic individuals find it difficult to adjust their behaviour when situations change.
A new study has found that the brains of autistic people respond less strongly to being told they have made a mistake.
The research, published in The Journal of Neuroscience , was carried out by scientists from Nottingham Trent University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Researchers discovered that autistic adults showed weaker brain responses to negative feedback compared with people without autism. They were also less influenced by how confident they felt about their decisions.
To understand these differences, scientists recorded brain activity while participants completed tasks involving the identification of sounds. The results showed that people without autism had stronger brain responses when they received negative feedback. Their decisions were also influenced by how easy or difficult a task was and how confident they felt about their answers.
They examined how people responded when told their answers were incorrect and whether this feedback affected their next decisions.
The study also found that people without autism were more likely to let previous successful attempts influence their next choices, especially when they had completed an easy task correctly.
