Lorcan Kenny, Anna Remington, and Elizabeth Pellicano (2024)

https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613231224093

Executive function is a group of skills including planning, inhibition and switching between tasks. Autistic people report struggling quite a lot with these skills. But, when researchers test these skills in the lab, they do not tend to find such big difficulties.

This paper, led by former CRAE PhD student Lorcan Kenny and former CRAE Director Liz Pellicano, together with current CRAE Director Anna Remington, takes the first step to bridging the lab and the real world by directly asking autistic teenagers about their EF skills. Their mothers were also asked about these skills to build up a rich understanding of what was going on.

19 autistic teens and 7 of their mothers (no fathers volunteered) were interviewed and asked about a specific situation in which they had excelled, or had difficulties with their EF abilities. Three themes were found:

When executive challenges collide with everyday life

Many experience planning as a significant struggle, often finding unique and varied approaches to accomplish everyday tasks. This journey can feel like navigating intensely chaotic worlds, where serial procesing and focusing on one task at a time becomes essential, yet the reality often involves the pressure of having to manage too many things at once.

EF does not exist in a vacuum.

It’s deeply intertwined with personal interests and emotional states. With genuine interest comes motivation. Anxiety can be overwhelming, freezing thought processes and making decision-making incredibly difficult. Factors like motor control or the clarity of instructions add layers of complexity to everyday tasks.

EF abilities – and the demands placed on them – are ever-changing

Executive functioning changes over time as people grow. As young people near adulthood, there’s often a deep-seated longing for greater autonomy. This desire marks a significant transition for parents who need to walk a ‘very narrow line’ between supporting their children and creating opportunities for experiment.

This research shows how lab-based EF tasks fail to capture the variable nature of everyday EF. The first-hand accounts showed that autistic young people’s EF is not always experienced as a difficulty or problem. It only becomes challenging when demands outpace teenagers’ developing EF skills. Parents shared the conflict they experienced between wanting to support their young people through challenges, but also recognising teens’ desire for greater autonomy and wanting to give enough opportunities for independence.

Existing laboratory-based measures of executive function does not capture the real-world context. Input from autistic young people can bridge this gap, leading to a more useful map of EF that aligns better with experiences and needs.