The Effect Of Social Information On Conflict Adaptation In Individuals With High Autistic Traits

Individuals overcome the distraction of irrelevant information and focus on the target stimulus is regarded as conflict control.Conflict adaptation is an indicator that is often used to measure the continuous conflict control capability.In our daily life,conflict control plays an important role during the processing of different kinds of information,including the social information generated though social interactions.It is well established that individuals with autism as well as high autistic traits process social information abnormally.Thus,it remains unclear whether the abnormal processing of social information affect their conflict control or not.This study examined the effect of social information on the conflict adaptation of different types of conflict in individuals with high autistic traits.And I adopted the event-related potential（ERP）technique to explore the electrophysiological mechanism of this effect.Study I adopted the Flanker task by adding two kinds of stimuli with social information（eye gaze direction and head orientation）to examine the effect of social information on the stimulus-stimulus conflict adaptation in individuals with high autistic traits.Study I adopted 2（Autistic traits: high,low）x 3（Block type: arrow orientation,eye gaze direction,head orientation）x 2（consistency of previous trial: consistent,inconsistent）x 2（consistency of current trial: consistent,inconsistent）mixed experimental design.Study II measured the effect of social information on stimulus-response conflict adaptation in individuals with high autistic traits.The Simon task with non-social information pictures in block 1 and pictures of faces with social information in block 2 were adopted.A 2（Autistic traits: high,low）x 2（Block type: non-social information,social information）x 2（consistency of previous trial: consistent,inconsistent）x 2（consistency of current trial:consistent,inconsistent）mixed experimental design was used in this study.The results of Study I showed that individuals with low autistic traits have better conflict adaptation in the social information block compared to individuals with high autistic traits.This finding was mainly demonstrated in behavioral outcomes,where the task-swiching effect（TSE）values of low autistic traits were smaller than those of high autistic trait subjects in the head orientation block,and in ERP outcomes,where the conflict adaptation effect（CAE）and TSE values of P3 latency were larger in the low autistic trait than in the high autistic trait group in the eye gaze direction block.For the behavioral response time results in Study II,the low autistic trait group had greater CAE and TSE values compared to the high autistic trait group in the nonsocial information block;For the ERP results in Study II,individuals with low autistic traits had significantly greater TSE values for both N2 peak and P3 latency in the nonsocial information block than the high autistic trait group.In conclusion,my experiments revealed that social information differentially influences conflict adaptation in individuals with high and low autistic traits.The effect of social information on individuals with low autistic traits varies with the type of conflict.Social information can facilitate conflict adaptation in individuals with low autistic traits in stimulus-stimulus conflicts,but hinder their conflict adaptation in stimulus-response conflicts.However,in both conflict types,social information does not have an effect on conflict adaptation in individuals with high autistic traits.