Emma Mueller¹, Miranda Scolari¹; ¹Texas Tech University

Priming occurs when a stimulus is repeated, leading to faster and/or more accurate responses to it. Individuals with autistic-like traits exhibit behavior consistent with an underutilization of trial history (Pomè et al., 2020), but the underlying processes that give rise to this weakened priming effect remains unclear. We examined how visual priming influences distinct components of perceptual decision making, and whether they are associated with autistic traits. Twenty-five neurotypical college students completed an Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) survey and a visual search task. This task consisted of locating a bite mark (left or right) within a uniquely colored target apple presented in one quadrant among three distracting whole apples occupying the remaining quadrants. On half the trials, the color and position of the target apple repeated from the previous trial (repeat trials); for the remaining half, the color and position changed from the previous trial (switch trials). The location of the target bite mark was randomly selected on each trial. As expected, we observed a significant priming effect within reaction time (RT; p <.001). The RT and accuracy data were then submitted to a drift diffusion model (Ratcliff & Tuerlinckx, 2002) to investigate priming within decision processes. Among the estimated components, only non-decision time showed significant differences between repeat and switch trials (p = .004). This suggests that priming decreased the time spent searching for the relevant apple before accumulating evidence in favor of one of the two response options. Furthermore, non-decision time was moderately correlated with AQ scores for both repeat (r = .405) and switch (r = .565) trials; individuals with lower AQ scores exhibited a larger priming benefit in non-decision time than those with higher scores. These findings advance our understating of the priming effect on decision-making and its association with autistic qualities in neurotypical adults.