Never gamble with an autistic opponent

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When attempting to make a rational choice, people with high-functioning autism may be less swayed by emotion than most.

That's the conclusion of Benedetto De Martino of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and colleagues, who found that people with autism tend to make more rational choices than non-autistics when making a decision about whether or not to gamble.

Two years ago a team led by De Martino, showed that most people considering a set of options are heavily influenced by how the options are put to them, irrespective of which option is more likely to benefit them.

Participants played a game in which they had a choice of earning £20 out of a possible £50, or gambling for the whole amount and risk getting nothing.

People were more likely to gamble when the first option was presented as a £30 loss rather than a £20 gain, even though there was no difference in the odds.

Autism benefit
People with autism seem to process emotions in an unusual way, so to see how they respond to such framing, the team conducted the experiment again with 15 people with Asperger's syndrome, or high-functioning autism.

In these people, the effect of changing the way the game was described was only half as powerful as with a non-autistic control group.

"Although autistic individuals do suffer difficulties in certain environments – such as social ones – their performance on certain tasks is better," says co-researcher Neil Harrison of University College London.

He says that such research may one day benefit people with autism. "Understanding more about how individuals with autism make decisions in their everyday life will help us tease apart how this contributes to the difficulties they experience," he says.

Michelle Dawson, who is autistic and researches cognition in autism at the University of Montreal in Canada calls the findings "fascinating and important".

"Autistics performed with enhanced accuracy compared to non-autistics, responding to the actual task demands rather than being hampered, as the non-autistics were, by the detrimental effects of unhelpful biases," she says.

Journal references: Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1128356); Journal of Neuroscience (in press)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... ad_dn14946

Almost like the Auties/Aspies had better ToM.

I played texas hold-em once in my life. With some people from work. I won all 3 pots we played (or what ever you'd call it) walked away with $300. They thought I was hustling them in telling them I never played before.

I kinda smiled on the inside cause they always complained they could never tell what I was doing (several of them fancied themselves as avid card players able to spot "tells" easily).

I kinda realized then that poker seemed to be an AS friendly game =P. I havnt played since then though =/.