Methods
Participants. We recruited 666 autistic participants via the
Netherlands Autism Register (NAR, https://nar.vu.nl/) and 517
non-autistic participants via the NAR as well as Prolific Academic. The
autistic participants reported a formal diagnosis by an independent,
qualified clinician. The non-autistic participants reported no diagnosis
of autism. All 1183 participants were fluent in Dutch. NAR participants
received \euro15 gift cards and Prolific Academic participant were
paid £15. All participants were naïve to the purpose of the study and
gave informed consent prior to the experiment. The experiment was
approved by the ethical committee from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
(VCWE-2020-041R1) in accordance with all guidelines and regulations as
specified in the Netherlands Code of Conduct for Research Integrity.
147 participants were excluded because either the demographic
information, the AQ-28 data, or the ICAR data were missing. The data
from another 167 participants were excluded from further analyses, since
their performance on the task matched one or multiple exclusion
criteria, as pre-registered in As Predicted (#102341). For precise
information on the number of participants from each group excluded (and
the reasons for their exclusion), refer to Supplementary Figure 1. The
demographic information for the remaining 869 participants is depicted
in Table 1, and the age distribution of the groups is shown in Figure 1.
Note that the non-autistic sample used in this study comprises of the
entirety of that in our earlier study (Jertberg et al., 2023), in
addition to later recruits.
Table 1: demographic breakdown by group.