[Published Article] Metacognition and Cognitive Flexibility in Autistic and Neurotypically-Developing Populations
A new study from our lab offers a new perspective on metacognition in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). ASD individuals may show superior metacognition in tasks involving visuo-spatial cognition. Cognitive flexibility, meanwhile, appears to be hindered not by metacognitive deficits but by overconfidence in one’s own decisions, both in neurotypically developing (TD) and ASD individuals.
On the 10th of July 2025, the scientific journal Brain and Behavior published the article “Metacognition and Cognitive Flexibility in Autistic and Neurotypically-Developing Populations”, co-authored by Mikhail Ordin and Leona Polyanskaya, researchers at the LMD Laboratory.
In this study, the researchers examine the relationship between metacognition and cognitive flexibility in ASD individuals. Metacognition was measured in a 3D mental rotation task (visuo-spatial cognitive domain, in which ASD individuals allegedly have an advantage over TD individuals.
Participants had to judge whether two 3-D images are identical rotated figures and they look different because they are pictured from different angles, or two 3-d images are different figures. On each trial, participants had to say if they are confident in their response. Better metacognition is manifested in higher confidence on correct responses and lower confidence on the wrong responses, reflecting that people are aware of how accurate their judgements are (metacognition is the ability to evaluate oneself).
Cognitive flexibility was assessed in a trading game with changing rules, in which the players had to sell some goods to “alien” races and optimize profit, although the match between which alien race offers the best price for which good fluctuates. The players with higher cognitive flexibility are more sensitive to the changes and more readily adapt their trading strategies to new situations. The researchers investigated whether the often-assumed metacognitive deficit in autism is linked to diminished cognitive flexibility and thus constrained behavioural adaptation.
The results show that ASD individuals can exhibit superior metacognitive insight in visual-spatial tasks suggesting that, in specific domains, autistic individuals may display metacognitive strengths, challenging a long-held assumptions about domain-general metacognitive deficit in ASD population.
However, cognitive flexibility was not related to how well people can evaluate their performance (i.e., no link between cognitive flexibility and metacognition was observed). The data showed that reduced cognitive flexibility is associated with overconfidence in decisions. Overconfidence does not prevent learning the rules, but once the rules are learnt, overconfidence prevents sensitivity to situations when the learnt decision-making strategy becomes sub-optimal, hence reducing the ability of behavioural adaptions in a changing environment. This trend was observed both in ASD and TD populations.
The published article is available here.