| Autism spectrum disorder(ASD)is a lifelong development mental disorder characterized by complex impairments of social interactions,and the deficits of cognitive control lead to repeated stereotype behavior.As an advanced ability of cognitive activities,cognitive control can help individuals filter irrelevant information and accomplish goal-oriented behavior.In recent year there has been growing interest in response control in individual with ASD and lots of them has demonstrated that response control is more difficult for individual with ASD,but there are a little research focused on conflict control and the conclusion is inconsistent.Research on typical development individual has shown that the effect of emotion on cognitive control,which means positive emotion promotes cognitive control and negative emotion restrains it.In addition,perceptual load plays an important role in the processing of emotion on cognitive control.After considering the effect of perceptual load,recent studies have found that individual was only processing emotion at the low level of perceptual load.As a result,researchers thought that emotion promotes or restrains cognitive control depends on the level of emotion occupied cognitive resources,also they suggested that arousal of emotion will affect cognitive control.Only when the level of arousal is moderate,cognitive control can be promoted.In the current studies of individual with ASD,we found there was no study to explore the effect of emotion.Based on this,this study uses the conflict control paradigm to investigate whether emotional conflict with different valence will affect cognitive control and whether this effect will be moderators by perceptual load.In experiment 1,face-word Stroop task was used to explore whether emotional could moderator cognitive conflict.The results showed that the correct rate of negative emotion of individuals with ASD was significantly lower than that of typical development individuals,and the response time under consistent conditions was significantly longer than that of typical development individuals,but there was no significant difference between them under inconsistent conditions.This indicates that autistic participants are weaker in general cognitive ability,but we do not find the effect of emotion.In experiment 2,we investigated whether perceptual load could moderator cognitive control of individuals with ASD by using emotional Flanker task.Utilizing meaningless words as irrelevant stimuli,four levels of load were set.The results showed that the correct rate of autistic participants was lower under the condition of consistent condition and load of 6.The response time of positive emotion in the two groups was longer than that of negative emotion under the loading of 4 and 6,but there was no significant difference between the two groups,which indicated that the consistency effect was weakened due to the increase of task difficulty.Changes in the processing rate of emotional stimuli occur in individuals with ASD.Different from previous research,we have not found that the interference of emotional faces will change with the different task perceived loads,and emotional stimulation will not affect the cognitive control of autistic participants because of the different perceptual loads.The results of this study support the theory of social motivation.Due to the low sensitivity to emotional stimulation and the inactivation of related brain regions in individuals with ASD,they are unable to devote too much cognitive resources to the in-depth processing of emotional stimuli.Therefore,emotional stimulation has no impact on the level of cognitive control under any conditions. |
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