Common outcome, different pathways: Social information-processing deficits in autism spectrum disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder

Table 1 Summary of social information-processing deficits in autism spectrum disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder

Social information processing steps	ASD	ADHD
Step 1: Encoding of social cues
Cue encoding and detection	Children with ASD found to be less accurate in cue encoding in social situations	Children with ADHD found to encode fewer social cues, and this inefficiency non-specific across all valences, suggesting involvement of attention and working memory difficulties
Social perception/cognition	Children with ASD showing more severe social perception/cognition deficits than children with ADHD and typically developing children	A larger contributing role of neurocognitive factors in social perception/cognition deficits in ADHD, including lower intelligence and ADHD symptomatology
Facial emotional recognition	Children with ASD showing generalized deficits in facial emotion recognition across all emotions with difficulties persisting into adulthood, suggesting a failure to develop specialization and expertise in facial emotional processing	Children with ADHD showing weaker emotion recognition but with increased performance variability and random errors, suggesting contributory role of inattentiveness in failure to attend to the appropriate cues of affects
Step 2: Interpretation of cues	Children with ASD showing a negative, global attribution style contributed by repeated negative social experiences, driving in turn withdrawal-based responses in social interaction	Children with ADHD showing a positive illusory bias to engage in impulsive and overly ambitious responses; inattention and working memory deficits playing an important role in cue misinterpretation
Step 3: Goal clarification	Adopting a non-social, withdrawal/avoidant goal orientation	Adopting an overly ambitious goal of confronting problems in social situations
Steps 4 and 5: Response construction and decision	Adolescents with ASD evaluating withdrawal responses as preferable and generating such responses to avoid problems in social interaction; reduced breadth of positive social experiences limiting availability of appropriate social responses in their memory database	Children with ADHD generating a lower proportion of positive responses and a higher proportion of negative responses in social situations; higher rates of negative interactions with peers resulting in fewer positive responses stored in their memory database
Step 6: Behavioural enactment	Children with ASD showing a social knowledge deficit affecting the enactment of social responses, resulting in social responses consistently less adaptive and appropriate	Children with ADHD showing a performance deficit with increased inconsistency and variability in enactment of social behaviours, incurred by the core symptomatology of ADHD

ASD: Autism spectrum disorder; ADHD: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.