Abstract
Efficient information sampling is crucial for human inference and decision-making even for young children. It is also closely associated with the core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), since both the social interaction difficulties and repetitive behaviors suggest that autistic people may sample information from the environment distinctively. However, the specific ways in which autistic children sample information, especially when facing explicit costs and adapting to environmental changes, remain unclear. Thirty-two autistic and 41 IQ-matched neurotypical children aged five to eight participated in a computerized bead task, where children decided to gather samples sequentially from an unknown target to infer which of the two options was the target. Autistic children showed lower sampling efficiency under costly conditions compared to neurotypical peers, resulting from increased variability in sample numbers across trials, rather than solely systematic sampling bias. Computational models indicated that while both groups shared a similar decision process, autistic children’s sampling decisions were less influenced by dynamic changes and more by recently gathered evidence. This led to higher sampling variation and lowered the efficiency of autistic children. These findings offer valuable insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying fundamental behaviors in autistic children.
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All the behavior data supporting the analyses and conclusions of the article are available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/WDTQ2.
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All the codes replicating the tables, figures, and statistical analyses of the article are available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/WDTQ2.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partly supported by the National Science and Technology Innovation 2030 Major Program (2022ZD0204800 to H.Z.), National Natural Science Foundation of China (32271116 and 32571244 to L.Y., and 32471152 to H.Z.), Clinical Medicine Plus X—Young Scholars Project of Peking University, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (to L.Y., and Grant No. PKU2023LCXQ023 and PKU2024LCXQ046 to H.Z.), and funding from Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or in the preparation of the manuscript. We would like to thank all the children and their parents for their participation. We are also thankful to Tianbi Li, Yixiao Hu, Zheng Wang, Xing Su, Luoyuan Zhang, Lu Chen, and Qingdao Elim School for their generous assistance with the study.
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H.L. collected, analyzed, and interpreted the data and drafted the manuscript. H.Z. and L.Y. provided supervision and funding acquisition. All authors participated in the conceptualization, reviewing, and editing of the manuscript.
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Lu, H., Zhang, H. & Yi, L. Autistic children sample costly information with increased variability due to inflexible updating. Commun Psychol (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-026-00439-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-026-00439-2
