Assessing executive attention in autistic children: strengths, weaknesses and individual differences

Research consistently shows that autistic children often exhibit cognitive challenges, particularly in executive functions (EFs), since the preschool years. EFs are cognitive abilities that help regulate impulses, manage information, filter distractions, and shift focus between tasks. Various performance-based measures have been developed to assess EFs in autistic children. However, inconsistencies in findings have raised concerns about the ability of traditional EF measures to capture the real-life challenges these children face, largely due to reductionist approaches and the overlooked issue of task impurity. Here, we employed a broader comprehensive battery – the Measures of Executive Attention - to assess EFs in 43 autistic children aged 8–14 years, compared to 43 neurotypicals matched for age, sex, and fluid reasoning index. The results revealed that neurotypicals outperformed autistic children in most tasks. Specifically, autistic children showed lower performance in cognitive flexibility and generative thinking in a graphical task, as well as in working memory capacity under novel and emotionally stressful conditions. However, when fine motor and verbal skills were excluded from the composite score calculation, no group differences emerged in certain tasks, such as visual search and working memory capacity in a familiar exercise. Our findings highlight the importance of assessing executive attention through multidimensional and context-sensitive tools and offer new insights into cognitive variability in autism.