People with autism-related disorders are less likely to make
irrational decisions, and are less influenced by gut instincts,
according to research funded by the Wellcome Trust. The study
adds to the growing body of research implicating altered
emotional processing in autism. 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". Previous studies have
shown that our response to a problem depends on how the problem
is posed – the so called "framing effect". A surgeon who tells a
patient that there is an 80% chance of surviving an operation is
more likely to gain consent than one who tells the patient there
is a 20% chance of dying, even though statistically these mean
the same thing. Now, in a study published in the Journal of
Neuroscience, researchers in Professor Ray Dolan's group at the
Wellcome Trust Centre for N