Physical exercise is widely reported beneficial to executive functions in children with autism spectrum disorder. However, its impact on self-regulation in the population remains unknown. This study is to test whether two types of physical exercise (cognitively engaging vs non-cognitively engaging) benefited self-regulation and whether the social,…

Prefrontal synthesis (PFS) is a component of constructive imagination. It is defined as the process of mentally juxtaposing objects into novel combinations. For example, to comprehend the instruction "put the cat under the dog and above the monkey," it is necessary to use PFS in order to correctly determine the spatial arrangement of the…

The critical role of executive functioning in autism as well as the co-occurring mental health challenges common among autistic youth support to the immense value of interventions targeting executive functioning for enhancing mental health services for autistic children. The goal of the present study was to conduct a randomized feasibility trial…

Compared to their neurotypically developing peers, children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders tend to have attenuated neural responses in the parietal lobe when attending sensory input, as reflected by a reduced P3b amplitude measured with electroencephalography. However, it is unknown whether a reduced P3b amplitude in autistic…

Purpose: Relative clauses present a well-known processing asymmetry between object-extracted and subject-extracted dependencies across both typical and atypical populations. The present study aimed at exploring the comprehension of object and subject relative clauses as conceptualized by the Relativized Minimality framework in autistic children…

This meta-analysis aimed to systematically investigate the cognitive and linguistic correlates of both word decoding and reading comprehension among children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) across orthographies. Based on data from 26 studies of 1.92- to 18.92-year-old children with ASD, we found that (1) intelligence, theory of mind, and…

The COVID-19 pandemic may have exacerbated depression, anxiety, and executive function (EF) difficulties in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). EF skills have been positively associated with mental health outcomes. Here, we probed the psychosocial impacts of pandemic responses in children with and without ASD by relating pre-pandemic EF…

Mental health conditions such as anxiety, depression, aggression, and inattention are common in autistic youth and are challenging to treat by community providers. We aim to parse the heterogeneity of autism based on dimensions of executive function and determine whether specific executive function profiles are differentially related to…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication, and behaviors or interests. Besides behavioral, psychopharmacological and biomedical interventions there is increasing evidence of non-invasive treatments like neurofeedback (NFB) that can improve brain…

Many children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have challenges in reading comprehension, especially when implicit information in narrative texts is involved. Three interrelated factors influencing reading comprehension have been proposed to explain these challenges: Theory of Mind -- ToM; executive functions -- EF; and central coherence -- CC.…

It is unclear whether children with autism spectrum disorders have atypical semantic fluency and lower memory for the semantics of words. Therefore, we examined semantic typicality, fluency and recall for the categories of fruits and animals in 60 children with autism aged 7-15 years (boys: 48/girls: 12) compared to 60 typically developing…

Reading comprehension difficulties exhibited by children with autism are related to executive function (EF) and theory of mind (ToM) deficits. However, the potential heterogeneity of ToM, EF, and reading comprehension abilities, and their interrelationships, among Chinese children with autism remains unclear. Using comprehensive sets of ToM and EF…

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) present deficits in regulation of their emotions which have a great impact on their mental health and well-being. There are several studies showing the connection between executive functions deficits and emotion dysregulation in the context of an ASD diagnosis. Our study aims to investigate which among…

Working memory functions as an underlying force for school readiness, yet many autistic children have difficulties with it. Similarly, autistic children tend to start kindergarten with less school readiness compared with their peers. In addition, children from lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds face additional barriers in working memory…

This study examines relationships between mathematical problem-solving performance (in terms of strategies used and accuracy) and the main cognitive domains associated with mathematical learning (i.e. executive functions, verbal comprehension and social perception) of children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD and non-ASD resp.). The…