Strategic social decision making undergoes significant changes in typically developing and autistic early adolescents

Abstract

Information sampling about others’ trustworthiness prior to cooperation allows humans to minimize the risk of exploitation. Here, we examined whether early adolescence or preadolescence, a stage defined as in between childhood and adolescence, is a significant developmental period for strategic social decisions. We also sought to characterize differences between autistic children and their typically developing (TD) peers. TD (N = 48) and autistic (N = 56) 8- to 12-year-olds played an online information sampling trust game. While both groups adapted their information sampling and cooperation to the various trustworthiness levels of the trustees, groups differed in how age and social skills modulated task behavior. In the TD group social skills were a stronger overall predictor of task behavior. In the autistic group, age was a stronger predictor and interacted with social skills. Computational modeling revealed that both groups used the same heuristic information sampling strategy—albeit older TD children were more efficient as reflected by decreasing decision noise with age. Autistic children had lower prior beliefs about the trustee's trustworthiness compared to TD children. These lower priors indicate that children believed the trustees to be less trustworthy. Lower priors scaled with lower social skills across groups. Notably, groups did not differ in prior uncertainty, meaning that the priors of TD and autistic children were equally strong. Taken together, we found significant development in information sampling and cooperation in early adolescence and nuanced differences between TD and autistic children. Our study highlights the importance of deep phenotyping of children including clinical measures, behavioral experiments and computational modeling.

Research Highlights

• We specified how early adolescents with and without an autism diagnosis sampled information about their interaction partners and made cooperation decisions in a strategic game.
• Early adolescence is a significant developmental period for strategic decision making, marked by significant changes in information sampling efficiency and adaptivity to the partner's behavior.
• Autistic and non-autistic groups differed in how age and social skills modulated task behavior; in non-autistic children behavior was more indicative of overall social skills.
• Computational modeling revealed differences between autistic and non-autistic groups in their initial beliefs about cooperation partners; autistic children expected their partners to be less trustworthy.