Performance measures reveal autistic children show lower cognitive flexibility and working memory compared to neurotypicals, suggesting the need for comprehensive assessments.
Key Points
To investigate executive attention capabilities in autistic children compared to neurotypical peers.
Assessed 43 autistic children aged 8-14 years against 43 neurotypical peers matched for age, sex, and fluid reasoning index using a comprehensive battery.
Utilized the Measures of Executive Attention for performance evaluation across various tasks.
Evaluated cognitive flexibility, generative thinking, and working memory under different conditions.
Neurotypical children outperformed autistic children on most executive function tasks.
Autistic children displayed lower cognitive flexibility and working memory capacity in stressful situations.
Exclusion of fine motor and verbal skills from scoring resulted in no significant group differences on some tasks.