Performance on a single executive function (EF) task (e.g., a card sorting task) is often taken to represent ability on the underlying subcomponent of EF (e.g., set shifting) without accounting for the non-specific and non-executive skills employed to complete the task. This study used a manualised battery of EF tasks to derive individual task…

Despite overlaps in clinical symptomatology, autism and ADHD may be associated with opposite autonomic arousal profiles which might partly explain altered cognitive and global functioning. We investigated autonomic arousal in 106 children/adolescents with autism, ADHD, co-occurring autism/ADHD, and neurotypical controls. Heart rate variability was…

Social communication and executive functioning challenges as well as co-occurring anxiety/depression may make acquiring the skills needed to manage daily life tasks difficult for diploma-track autistic youth, thus limiting their participation in adult roles. This study describes the associations between executive function, social communication…

Autobiographical memory (AM) is a socially-relevant cognitive skill. Little is known regarding AM during early childhood in ASD. Parent-child reminiscing conversations predict AM in non-ASD populations but have rarely been examined in autism. To address this gap, 17 preschool-aged children (ages 4-6 years) with ASD and 21 children without ASD…

Episodic foresight (EpF) or, the ability to imagine the future and use such imagination to guide our actions, is an important aspect of cognition that has not yet been explored in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This is despite its proposed links with theory of mind (ToM) and executive function (EF), two areas found to be impaired in…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterised by profound difficulties in empathic processing and executive control. Whilst the links between these processes have been frequently investigated in populations with autism, few studies have examined them at the subclinical level. In addition, the contribution of alexithymia, a trait characterised by…