Strategic decision making and prediction differences in autism

Vasileios Mantas; Artemios Pehlivanidis; Katerina Papanikolaou; Vasileia Kotoula; Charalambos Papageorgiou

doi:10.7717/peerj.13328

Strategic decision making and prediction differences in autism

PeerJ. 2022 Apr 21:10:e13328. doi: 10.7717/peerj.13328. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Vasileios Mantas¹, Artemios Pehlivanidis¹, Katerina Papanikolaou², Vasileia Kotoula³, Charalambos Papageorgiou¹

Affiliations

¹ 1st Department of Psychiatry, Eginition Hospital, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece.
² Department of Child Psychiatry, Agia Sophia Children's Hospital, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece.
³ Experimental Therapeutics and Pathophysiology Branch, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.

Abstract

Background: Several theories in autism posit that common aspects of the autism phenotype may be manifestations of an underlying differentiation in predictive abilities. The present study investigates this hypothesis in the context of strategic decision making in autistic participants compared to a control group.

Method: Autistic individuals (43 adults, 35 male) and a comparison group (42 adults, 35 male) of age and gender matched individuals, played a modified version of the prisoner's dilemma (PD) task where they were asked, if capable, to predict their opponents' move. The predictive performance of the two groups was assessed.

Results: Overall, participants in the autism group had a significantly lower number of correct predictions. Moreover, autistic participants stated, significantly more frequently than the comparison group, that they were unable to make a prediction. When attempting a prediction however, the success ratio did not differ between the two groups.

Conclusions: These findings indicate that there is a difference in prediction performance between the two groups. Although our task design does not allow us to identify whether this difference is due to difficulty to form a prediction or a reluctance in registering one, these findings could justify a role for prediction in strategic decision making during the PD task.

Keywords: Autism; Desicion making; Prediction; Prisoner’s dilemma.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Autistic Disorder* / diagnosis
Decision Making
Humans
Male
Prisoner Dilemma

Grants and funding

Funding for this research was granted by the Region of Attica—Greece. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.