| People with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) often show atypical performance on tasks that require processing of local information independently of its context (Behrmann, Thomas, & Humphreys, 2006; Frith, 1989; Happé & Frith, 2006). For example, people with ASC are better than control participants at finding figures embedded in complex shapes, their visual search is less affected by the number and similarity of distractors, and they often fail to take semantic context into account when pronouncing homographs (see Happé & Frith, 2006, for a review). Nonclinical samples scoring high on measures of autistic traits display a similar pattern of performance (e.g., M. E. Stewart, Watson, Allcock, & Yaqoob, 2009). This reduced impact of context may reflect an inability to integrate information into a coherent whole (Frith, 1989) but may also be understood solely in terms of a superior ability to process local information (Plaisted, Saksida, Alcántara, & Weisblatt, 2003). We investigated whether the reduced context sensitivity that characterizes ASC extends to decision making. Decision making is a fundamental cognitive operation that has received relatively little attention from autism researchers (Davis & Plaisted-Grant, 2015; Luke, Clare, Ring, Redley, & Watson, 2012). Most previous studies have focused on how people with ASC represent and evaluate probabilities and rewards, often using tasks in which the decision maker must learn the payoffs and probabilities of different options by making a series of choices and receiving feedback (e.g., Mussey, Travers, Klinger, & Klinger, 2015). We took a different approach by examining whether autistic traits correlate with altered context sensitivity in a riskless choice task, in which the participant simply selects the best alternative on the basis of explicitly stated attribute values. Conventional accounts of rational choice dictate that a person’s preference between two items be independent of the other options on offer: If one prefers salmon to steak, this should not change just because frogs’ legs are added to the menu (Luce & Raiffa, 1957). However, the choices of neurotypical adults are heavily influenced by the composition of the choice set; rather than being based on an independent assessment, the attractiveness of a given option depends on how it compares with the other values that are simultaneously present (Huber, Payne, & Puto, 1982; Simonson, 1989; Tversky, 1972). One of the most striking examples of this phenomenon is the attraction effect, which arises when people choose between two options, A and B, that “trade off” two dimensions—for example, two USB drives that respectively have lower capacity but higher longevity and higher capacity but lower longevity. When the choice set includes a third, “decoy” option that is fractionally worse than A on both dimensions, people very rarely choose the decoy, but its presence boosts the tendency to choose A rather than B—and vice versa if the decoy targets option B (Fig. 1, top panels). This kind of context-induced preference reversal occurs in many domains (e.g., Farmer, El-Deredy, Howes, & Warren, 2015), has been extensively modeled (e.g., Trueblood, Brown, & Heathcote, 2014), and is used by marketers to influence consumer behavior (Ariely, 2009). |
