Autism, impulsivity and inhibition a review of the literature

Abstract

Patients with autism have difficulties with social interaction and communication and often exhibit repetitive and stereotyped behaviours. Many patients also exhibit impulsive forms of behaviour with negative impact on their quality of life. Although there have been many studies assessing behavioural inhibition in order to find the underlying mechanism of these disruptive forms of behaviour, the existence of inhibitory deficits in autism is still a subject of discussion. Discrepancies in results are due to the heterogeneity of tasks designs and research samples. Little is known about inhibition of socially relevant stimuli in autism because prior studies were mostly focused on inhibition in non-social context. Research of inhibitory control in social-relevant context is important, because patients with autism have problems mainly in social situations. In this review we will focus on studies of response inhibition, interference control and their neural correlates in patients with autism and discuss the possible sources of inconsistencies in the results. We include studies of behavioural inhibition in autism which were written in English and published between 1990 and 2017. Literature was searched by PubMed and Web of Science.