Do autistic individuals show atypical performance in probabilistic learning? A comparison of cue-number, predictive strength, and prediction error

Autistic adults showed similar performance as non-autistic adults in learning associations by inferring a single cue or integrating multiple cues when the predictive strength was strong. However, non-autistic adults outperformed autistic adults when the predictive strength was weak, but only in the later phase. Autistic individuals were also more likely to incorporate prediction errors during decision making, which may explain their atypical performance on the weakly predictive associations. Our findings have implications for understanding differences in social cognition, which is often noisy and weakly predictive, among autistic individuals.