Assessing executive attention in autistic children: strengths, weaknesses and individual differences

Learning Objectives:

1. Describe how the Measures of Executive Attention (MEA) battery addresses the task impurity problem by controlling for collateral linguistic and fine-motor demands, and explain how accounting for these abilities altered between-group differences (autistic vs. neurotypical children) on tasks such as visual search and working memory capacity in familiar conditions.
2. Identify the specific executive attention domains in which autistic children aged 8–14 showed weaknesses relative to neurotypical peers (cognitive flexibility and generative thinking in a graphical task; working memory capacity under novel, emotionally demanding conditions), and explain the relevance of task withdrawal patterns and emotion regulation to interpreting executive function performance in this population.

Anderle, F., Pasqualotto, A., Bentenuto, A., Venuti, P., & Benso, F. (2025). Assessing executive attention in autistic children: strengths, weaknesses and individual differences. Child Neuropsychology. https://doi.org/10.1080/09297049.2025.2600608