Judith Goris

• Doctor of Psychology
• Postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University

The balancing of cognitive flexibility versus stability is an important everyday skill that can be learned through reinforcement and may be impaired in autism or other transdiagnostic traits. In this preregistered study (n=412), we show that rewarding people more on task switch trials led them to show more voluntary switching behaviour, but also mo...

When faced with many options to choose from, humans and other agents typically need to explore the utility of new choice options. People with an autism diagnosis or elevated autism traits are thought to avoid exploring such unknown options. In a large sample (N = 588), we investigated the impact of autism diagnosis or elevated autism traits on expl...

When faced with many options to choose from, humans and other agents typically need to explore the utility of new choice options. People with an autism diagnosis or elevated autism traits are thought to avoid exploring such unknown options. In a large sample (N = 588), we investigated the impact of autism diagnosis or elevated autism traits on expl...

The term “self-bias” refers to the human propensity to prioritize self- over other-related stimuli and is believed to influence various stages of the processing stream. By means of event-related potentials (ERPs), it was recently shown that the self-bias in a shape-label matching task modulates early as well as later phases of information processin...

Recent theories of autism propose that a core deficit in autism would be a less context-sensitive weighting of prediction errors. There is also first support for this hypothesis on an early sensory level. However, an open question is whether this decreased context sensitivity is caused by faster updating of one???s model of the world (i.e., higher...

Recent theories propose that autism is characterized by an impairment in determining when to learn and when not. We investigated this by estimating learning rate in environments varying in volatility and uncertainty. Specifically, we correlated autistic traits (in 163 neurotypical participants) with modelled learning behaviour during probabilistic...

Background Recent theories of autism propose that a core deficit in autism would be a less context-sensitive weighting of prediction errors. There is also first support for this hypothesis on an early sensory level. However, an open question is whether this decreased context-sensitivity is caused by faster updating of one’s model of the world (i.e....

A common idea about individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is that they have an above‐average preference for predictability and sameness. However, surprisingly little research has gone toward this core symptom, and some studies suggest the preference for predictability in ASD might be less general than commonly assumed. Here, we investigat...

Recent predictive coding theories propose that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by an impairment in determining when to learn and when not. Here, we investigated this hypothesis by estimating learning rate in three different environments that differed in volatility and uncertainty. Specifically, using a dimensional approach, we corre...

Background: Recent predictive coding accounts of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) suggest that a key deficit in ASD concerns the inflexibility in modulating local prediction errors as a function of global top-down expectations. As a direct test of this central hypothesis, we used electroencephalography to investigate whether local prediction error pr...

Diminished responding to hearing one’s own name is one of the earliest and strongest predictors of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Here, we studied, for the first time, the neural correlates of hearing one’s own name in ASD. Based on existing research, we hypothesized enhancement of late parietal positive activity specifically for the own name in n...

Background Associations and regularities in our environment can foster expectations and thereby help create a perceptually predictable world (e.g., a knife next to a plate predicts with high certainty a fork on the other side). Based on several observations, it has been suggested that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have an above a...