Background Autistic individuals often have difficulty flexibly adjusting their behavior. However, laboratory experiments have yielded inconsistent results, potentially due to various influencing factors, which need to be examined in detail. This study aimed to investigate the hypothesis that the social content of stimuli could play a specific role in some of the flexibility challenges faced by autistic individuals. The second aim was to explore sex differences in this context. Methods We analyzed data from 256 adult participants (124 with autism), matched on age, gender, and sex, who performed an emotional shifting task involving unpredictable shifts between positive and negative stimuli. Additionally, the task included both social and non-social conditions. Results Our results revealed a larger switch cost in the social than in the non-social condition, and this was more pronounced in autistic than in non-autistic individuals. Furthermore, we observed that autistic females differed fr

Background An intense and precocious interest in written material, together with a discrepancy between decoding and reading comprehension skills are defining criteria for hyperlexia, which is found in up to 20% of autistic individuals. It may represent the extreme end of a broader interest in written material in autism. This study examines the magnitude and nature of the interest in written material in a large population of autistic and non-autistic children. Methods All 701 children (391 autistic, 310 non-autistic) under the age of 7 referred to an autism assessment clinic over a span of 4 years were included. Ordinal logistic regressions assessed the association between diagnosis and the level of interest in letters and numbers. A nested sample of parents of 138 autistic, 99 non-autistic clinical, and 76 typically developing (TD) children completed a detailed questionnaire. Cox proportional hazards models analyzed the age of emergence of these interests. Linear regressions evaluated