Paranoia and Data-Gathering Biases in Autism

Overview

Journal J Autism Dev Disord

Publisher Springer

Date 2024 Feb 29

PMID 38421502

Authors

Kristina Bennert

Mark Brosnan

Amy Canning

Ged Roberts

Ailsa Russell

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Previous research has identified contradictory patterns in autism upon probabilistic reasoning tasks, and high levels of self-report paranoia symptoms have also been reported. To explore this relationship, the present study assessed 64 non-autistic and 39 autistic adults on two variants of a probabilistic reasoning task which examined the amount of evidence required before making a decision and 'jumping to conclusions' (a neutral beads task and an emotionally-salient words variant). The autism group was found to require significantly more evidence before making a decision and to have significantly less jumping to conclusions than the non-autistic group. For those with relatively low levels of paranoia, the emotionally-salient variant impacted on the non-autistic group, but not the autism group.

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