Increasing Adaptive Behavior Skill Deficits From Childhood to Adolescence in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Role of Executive Function

Abstract

Almost half of all children with autism spectrum disorder have average cognitive abilities, yet outcome remains poor. Because outcome in HFASD is more related to adaptive behavior skills than cognitive level it is important to identify predictors of adaptive behavior. This study examines cognitive and demographic factors related to adaptive behavior, with specific attention to the role of executive function (EF) in youth with HFASD aged 4–23. There was a negative relationship between age and adaptive behavior and the discrepancy between IQ and adaptive behavior increased with age. EF problems contributed to lower adaptive behavior scores across domains. As such, it is important to target adaptive skills, and the EF problems that may contribute to them, in youth with HFASD.

Resting-state functional connectivity predicts longitudinal change in autistic traits and adaptive functioning in autism

“…In our own study, we found that time 2 ABAS scores but not time 2 SRS scores were significantly improved from mean time 1 scores. In contrast to our findings, several recent studies have found that samples of individuals with ASD without intellectual disability actually show an age-related decline in adaptive behaviors as measured by the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (VABS) (2,3,6,37). This difference could be due to our choice of the General Adaptive Composite scores from the ABAS rather than the VABS, or that we used longitudinal data rather than performing a cross-sectional study.…”

“…Others reported more modest numbers for these predictors, with IQ predicting 3% of variance in outcome and language ability predicting 32% of variance in outcome (14). A study that included only individuals with ASD without cooccurring intellectual disability found age and IQ as weaker predictors, predicting 6-28% of various adaptive behavior subscales (6). Although these previous studies have been successful in predicting these outcomes using behavioral measures, in most cases, the majority of the variance in outcomes remains unexplained.…”

“…Adolescence and young adulthood are poorly understood in ASD. Although there seems to be a great deal of change during this time, the nature of this change varies across studies, with a handful of studies reporting a decline in functioning (2,3,6), others reporting general improvement (7,8), and still others reporting a quadratic course of autistic symptoms and adaptive functioning where the trajectory peaks in late adolescence (9) or the late 20s (10) and begins to fall subsequently.…”

Age-moderating effect in prepotent response inhibition in boys with Asperger syndrome: a 2.5 years longitudinal study

“…Previous research proposed typical and atypical developmental trajectories of distinct EFs in ASD with intact performance for prepotent response inhibition tasks, planning tasks and set-shifting tasks in older youths with ASD, but no age-moderating effect for spatial working memory or interference control tasks [12,18,19]. Additionally, several studies found an association between executive functions and adaptive behavior [20][21][22][23][24][25]. Compared with clinical psychometric tests of EFs, the MPT do not draw on academic skills that may vary considerably across different age-groups and may, therefore, better apt to disentangle more specific processes of EFs in juvenile AS (please see [5] for more details) and thus may be especially useful to study the association between executive functions and adaptive behavior in ASD with no intellectual deficits.…”

Relationship between Adaptive Functioning and Severity of Symptoms among Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

“…Adaptive functioning is the usual performance of daily life activities and it is considered the ability to convert cognitive potential into real world skills Pugliese [10]. The American Association on Mental Retardation (AAMR) defined adaptive behavior as "the collection of conceptual, social, and practical skills that have been learned by people in order to function in everyday lives" Matson & Glidden [11].…”