Temporal choice dynamics track opponent-dependent adaptation in autism
Abstract
Autism spectrum disorder involves differences in social communication, interaction and behavioral flexibility, yet conventional single-response Theory-of-Mind tasks rarely capture the trial-by-trial dynamics of social adaptation. We examined how autistic and non-autistic young people organized recent choice history, how they adjusted it across opponents, and how these patterns related to task performance. Twenty-seven autistic children and adolescents and 24 healthy controls completed the same two-choice hide-and-seek task under social and non-social framing against artificial opponents of graded sophistication. We compared aggregate performance, Bayesian model-based estimates of latent strategy use, and model-free history kernels measuring how current choices depended on recent self-actions and opponent actions. History kernels showed that autistic participants switched away from their previous choice more strongly against every opponent, whereas controls added lag-2 and opponent-coupled structure when the opponent adapted to them and reconfigured their kernels across opponents more. Within the same dataset, replaying participants’ kernels against empirically fitted opponents reconstructed accuracy (r = .86) and the direction of the group difference against the first-order opponent, against which switching provided less benefit than against the zero-order opponent. Against the first-order opponent, controls were more often described by first-order opponent modelling (influence learning) and autistic participants by heuristic policies. These findings suggest that autism-related differences in repeated interaction are expressed in how choice history is organized and reconfigured across opponents, beyond categorical differences in inferred strategies.
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BibTeX
@misc{godazgar2026temporal,
title = {{Temporal choice dynamics track opponent-dependent adaptation in autism}},
author = {Tahmineh Godazgar and Rana Ghamari and Abolfazl Nadi and Atiye Sarabi-Jamab},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/mu9cr_v3},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/mu9cr_v3/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Temporal choice dynamics track opponent-dependent adaptation in autism
AU - Tahmineh Godazgar
AU - Rana Ghamari
AU - Abolfazl Nadi
AU - Atiye Sarabi-Jamab
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/12
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/mu9cr_v3
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/mu9cr_v3/
AB - Autism spectrum disorder involves differences in social communication, interaction and behavioral flexibility, yet conventional single-response Theory-of-Mind tasks rarely capture the trial-by-trial dynamics of social adaptation. We examined how autistic and non-autistic young people organized recent choice history, how they adjusted it across opponents, and how these patterns related to task performance. Twenty-seven autistic children and adolescents and 24 healthy controls completed the same two-choice hide-and-seek task under social and non-social framing against artificial opponents of graded sophistication. We compared aggregate performance, Bayesian model-based estimates of latent strategy use, and model-free history kernels measuring how current choices depended on recent self-actions and opponent actions. History kernels showed that autistic participants switched away from their previous choice more strongly against every opponent, whereas controls added lag-2 and opponent-coupled structure when the opponent adapted to them and reconfigured their kernels across opponents more. Within the same dataset, replaying participants’ kernels against empirically fitted opponents reconstructed accuracy (r = .86) and the direction of the group difference against the first-order opponent, against which switching provided less benefit than against the zero-order opponent. Against the first-order opponent, controls were more often described by first-order opponent modelling (influence learning) and autistic participants by heuristic policies. These findings suggest that autism-related differences in repeated interaction are expressed in how choice history is organized and reconfigured across opponents, beyond categorical differences in inferred strategies.
ER -