Summary:
A neuroimaging and behavioral study published in The Journal of Neuroscience explains why many autistic adults find it difficult to adapt rapidly to changing environments. Researchers from Nottingham Trent University and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem report that people on the autism spectrum show substantially reduced neural responses to explicit negative feedback and diminished sensitivity to their own decision confidence. This dual attenuation — of external corrective signals and internal certainty — appears to undermine the flexible updating of behavior.
Key Facts:
- Reduced Error-Related Neural Response: Electrophysiological recordings show that autistic adults produce markedly smaller neural responses to explicit negative feedback during auditory discrimination tasks, compared with neurotypical adults.
- Diminished Confidence Integration: Whereas neurotypical participants’ feedback processing and subsequent choices were strongly influenced by task difficulty and subjective confidence, autistic participants were less sensitive to fluctuations in decision certainty.
- Lack of Success-Driven Bias: Neurotypical participants tended to adjust later choices after easy, successful trials; autistic participants showed substantially less bias from prior easy successes, indicating different strategies for incorporating feedback.
Source: Society for Neuroscience (SfN) / Nottingham Trent University / Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Overview
A central feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is reduced cognitive flexibility — the ability to modify behavior, expectations, and strategies when circumstances change. While clinicians and researchers have long described rigidity and insistence on sameness in behavioral terms, the computational and neurobiological processes that govern how autistic brains evaluate outcomes and update behavior were less well understood.
This collaborative study, led by Nathaniel Zuk, PhD, and Jaroslav Slobodskoy-Plusnin, PhD, along with colleagues at University College London, used behavioral testing combined with electroencephalography (EEG) to examine how external feedback and internal confidence signals shape perceptual decisions in autistic and non-autistic adults.
Tracking Neural Responses to Negative Feedback
Participants completed a pitch discrimination task in which they judged subtle frequency differences between tones and immediately received visual feedback indicating correct or incorrect responses. EEG measured event-related potentials associated with outcome evaluation and performance monitoring.
Although overall task accuracy was similar across groups, the feedback-related negativity (FRN) — an EEG component that differentiates negative from positive feedback — was significantly attenuated in autistic participants. In other words, when errors occurred, the neural error signal registered by autistic adults was weaker, suggesting that corrective environmental inputs carry less neurophysiological salience.
Decision Confidence and Behavioral Updating
Adaptive learning depends on combining external feedback with internal metacognitive signals such as confidence. When someone is certain yet proven wrong, the resulting prediction error typically drives rapid adjustment; by contrast, feedback on low-confidence guesses weighs less in future decisions.
To test the role of subjective certainty, the researchers varied trial difficulty and collected confidence reports. Neurotypical participants showed strong modulation of feedback-evoked EEG signals and subsequent choices by task difficulty and self-reported confidence. After easy correct trials, neurotypical individuals tended to bias subsequent perceptual judgments toward the pitch relationships just experienced.
Autistic participants exhibited reduced trial-by-trial behavioral updating following easy, successful trials and showed weaker modulation of EEG responses by perceptual difficulty. Their subsequent choices were less influenced by prior task difficulty and subjective confidence, indicating a decoupling between internal certainty and external feedback in guiding behavior.
Implications: A Dual-Feedback Deficit
The findings support a model in which autism involves lower sensitivity to two complementary types of feedback: external signals that indicate when a response is incorrect, and internal metacognitive signals that register confidence. Because flexible decision-making requires continuously calibrating internal predictions against external outcomes, blunted sensitivity to either or both signals can slow behavioral adaptation in dynamic social and sensory contexts.
The authors plan follow-up work to identify the cortical circuits that mediate these outcome-evaluation dynamics, with a focus on the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The ACC is implicated in conflict monitoring, error-related activity, and reinforcement learning; clarifying its role could inform computational models and interventions designed to support autistic individuals during complex transitions in education, work, and social settings.
Editorial Notes:
- This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
- The journal article was reviewed in full by staff.
- Additional context was provided by the editorial team.
About this neurotech and schizophrenia Research:
- Media Contact: SfN Media
- Source: SfN
- Image Credit: Image credited to Neuroscience News
- Original Research (Open Access): Journal of Neuroscience (Oct 26, 2026). “Neurocognitive Characteristics of Perceptual Feedback Processing Differ in Autism.” Authors: Nathaniel J. Zuk, Jaroslav Y. Slobodskoy-Plusnin, Yarden Weiss, VishnuPriya Sampath, Kira M. Düsterwald, Athena Akrami and Merav Ahissar.
- DOI: 10.1038/s41593-026-02490-y
Abstract
Neurocognitive Characteristics of Perceptual Feedback Processing Differ in Autism
Autistic individuals often show reduced adaptation to changing environmental demands, yet the neurocognitive mechanisms behind this difference have been unclear. This study tested whether reduced sensitivity to external feedback and to changes in task difficulty could explain slower updating. Autistic and non-autistic adults, matched for cognitive ability, completed a pitch discrimination task with immediate feedback.
Although accuracy was similar between groups, autistic participants exhibited a markedly reduced feedback-related negativity (FRN) and weaker modulation of feedback-evoked EEG responses by perceptual difficulty. They also showed reduced trial-by-trial behavioral updating of perceptual bias following recent correct and easy trials. These effects were replicated in a follow-up experiment 1–2 years later. When combined, the neural and behavioral measures classified autistic and non-autistic participants with about 80% accuracy. Overall, these findings indicate that multiple processes for evaluating perceptual decisions and adjusting behavior differ in autism and likely contribute to slower updating in changing contexts.
