Are Executive Dysfunctions Relevant for the Autism-Specific Cognitive Profile?

Julia Hemmers; Christopher Baethge; Kai Vogeley; Christine M Falter-Wagner

doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2022.886588

Are Executive Dysfunctions Relevant for the Autism-Specific Cognitive Profile?

Front Psychiatry. 2022 Jul 18:13:886588. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2022.886588. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Julia Hemmers¹, Christopher Baethge², Kai Vogeley^{2

3}, Christine M Falter-Wagner^{1

4}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychiatry, Medical Faculty, Ludwig Maximillians Universitaet (LMU) Munich, Munich, Germany.
² Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Medical Faculty, University Hospital of Cologne, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.
³ Institute of Neurosciences and Medicine-Cognitive Neuroscience, Research Center Juelich, Jülich, Germany.
⁴ Department of Psychology, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.

Abstract

Executive functions (EF) have been shown to be important for the understanding of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), but dysfunctions of EF are not autism-specific. The specific role of EF in ASD, its relationship to core autism characteristics, such as mentalizing, needs to be explored. Medline- and PsychINFO databases were searched for studies published between 1990 and 2020 that included measures of EF in ASD and typically developing control persons (TD) in combination with either Theory of Mind (ToM) or Weak Central Coherence (WCC) tasks. A pre-registered meta-analysis and cross-study regression was performed including a total of 42 studies (ASD n = 1,546, TD n = 1,206). Results were reported according to PRISMA guidelines. In all cognitive domains, the ASD group showed significantly reduced performance. Importantly, EF subdomains and ToM were not significantly correlated. This finding rules out a significant association between EF subdomains and ToM and questions the relevance of EF dysfunctions for the autism-specific feature of reduced mentalizing.

Keywords: autism (ASD); cognitive profile; executive function; theory of mind; weak central coherence.