Investigating Autistic Hyper-Focus and Monotropism: Limited Convergence of Event-Related Potentials, Laboratory Tasks, and Questionnaire Responses

Purpose: The autistic-developed monotropism account suggests autism is characterized by hyper-focus towards interests, although hyper-focus research has not explored associations among self-/caregiver-report and lab-based measures. Other findings suggest autistic attention has an enhanced capacity and/or is unusually prone to involuntary capture. This study used questionnaires and lab-based tasks to investigate autistic attention and probe its relations to inattention/distractibility, sensory experiences, and anxiety.Methods: 18 autistic and 22 comparison adolescents completed self-report measures of hyper-focus, anxiety, and sensory experiences, and laboratory psychoacoustic tasks, visual working memory and cross-modal attention capture accuracy and reaction time tasks, and a hyper-focus paradigm relying on the N2pc and Pd event-related potentials. Participants’ caregivers completed proxy hyper-focus, anxiety, sensory experiences, and inattention questionnaires.Results: Autistic participants had elevated hyper-focus per self- and caregiver-report questionnaires, and exhibited less visual working memory capacity, potentially reflecting difficulty attending to multiple targets. However, groups did not differ in event-related potentials indexing hyper-focus, or behavioural cross-modal attention capture. Different types of attention measures were generally not related to one another. Participants and their caregivers overall viewed hyper-focus’ impact as modestly positive, with individual opinions differing. Self-reported hyper-focus was related to self-reported misophonia and sensory hyperreactivity.Conclusions: Questionnaires suggest hyper-focus is elevated in autism and has mixed, nuanced real-world impacts. However, some laboratory paradigms with explicit instructions in highly controlled, often non-naturalistic environments may struggle capture real-world autistic attentional experiences; additional research is needed to align laboratory and questionnaire measures. This study also suggests autistic perceptual capacities are not globally enhanced.