People with autism make rational decisions

LONDON, Oct. 16 (UPI) -- People with autism-related disorders are less likely to make irrational decisions and are less influenced by gut instincts, British researchers said.

Ray Dolan of the Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging at the University College London said decision-making is a complex process, involving both intuition and analysis: analysis involves computation and more "rational" thought, but is slower; intuition, by contrast, is much faster, but less accurate, relying on heuristics or "gut instincts."

Participants in the study performed a task involving deciding whether or not to gamble with a sum of money.

The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found people with autism tended to be more consistent in their pattern of choices, their greater attention to detail perhaps helping them avoid being swayed by their emotions.

"During social interactions a lot of information must be processed simultaneously, making this a very complicated computational task for the brain," Dr. Benedetto De Martino said in a statement.

"To solve these complex problems we rely on simplifying heuristics -- gut instincts -- rather than extensive logical reasoning. However, the price that we seem to pay for this ability is that sometimes irrelevant contextual information leads us to make inconsistent or illogical choices."