Jerusalem, 29 October, 2026 (TPS-IL) — Autistic and non-autistic adults can perform equally well on a perceptual task while their brains respond differently to mistakes, assess decision difficulty and use recent experiences to guide future choices, according to an international study led by Israeli researchers.

The findings could eventually help researchers better understand why autistic people differ in how they respond to feedback and changing circumstances, potentially informing more individualized approaches to support. By identifying three distinct differences in how the brain evaluates mistakes, decision difficulty and recent experiences, the study offers new avenues for investigating the varied ways autism affects learning and decision-making.

Autism is a developmental condition that can affect social interaction, communication, behavior and sensory processing, with abilities and support needs varying widely among individuals. Autism’s exact causes remain unclear, but it is understood to arise from a complex combination of genetic factors and influences on early brain development.

The study was led by Prof. Merav Ahissar of the Hebrew University’s Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences. Researchers identified three distinct differences in brain activity and decision-making, which they reproduced in a follow-up experiment one to two years later.

“Our findings suggest that the differences associated with autism are not necessarily in the ability to perceive information accurately, but in how the brain evaluates experiences and uses them to guide future decisions,” Ahissar said.

“We identified several distinct processes that may help us understand why adapting to rapidly changing situations can be more challenging for autistic individuals,” she added.

Different Brain Responses

The researchers asked 33 autistic and 35 non-autistic adults to listen to pairs of tones and identify which had the higher pitch. After each answer, participants received feedback indicating whether they were correct. Researchers simultaneously recorded their brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG), which measures electrical signals produced by the brain.

Both groups achieved approximately 70% accuracy, but their brain responses and subsequent decisions revealed three differences.

First, autistic participants showed a significantly weaker electrical response to negative feedback. The researchers measured this response through a signal known as feedback-related negativity, which is associated with the brain’s processing of unfavorable outcomes.

Second, autistic participants’ brain responses were less sensitive to the difficulty of a decision. Among non-autistic participants, brain activity varied depending on how challenging a decision had been. This variation was significantly weaker among autistic participants.

Third, non-autistic participants adjusted their subsequent decisions more strongly after easy trials they had answered correctly. The researchers suggested that this pattern reflected greater reliance on information obtained under conditions in which participants could trust their judgments. Autistic participants showed a weaker adjustment, suggesting that recent successful experiences influenced their subsequent decisions differently.

The findings suggest that the two groups’ differences were not in their overall ability to distinguish between sounds, but in how their brains evaluated feedback, assessed decision difficulty and used previous experiences to inform later choices.

To test whether the differences persisted over time, the researchers conducted a follow-up experiment with 51 participants one to two years later. All three differences were reproduced, and the measures remained consistent within individuals across the two testing sessions.

The three measures were not significantly correlated with one another, suggesting that they reflect distinct processes rather than a single underlying mechanism.

When the researchers combined the measures in a machine-learning model, it distinguished between autistic and non-autistic participants with approximately 80% accuracy. However, the researchers cautioned that the findings do not establish a diagnostic test for autism.

The experiment did not directly establish how these differences affect everyday behavior or prove that they explain why some autistic people find changing circumstances challenging. Instead, it identified distinct patterns in how participants processed information and made subsequent decisions under controlled conditions.

The study was published on bioRxiv, an online repository for research papers that have not yet undergone peer review.