Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is marked by a range of challenges including cognitive and socio-emotional differences as well as difficulties to flexibly adjust to unpredictable situations. It has recently been suggested that people with ASD hold rigid expectations about upcoming events that tend to be shaped by information that is unlikely to repeat in the future. Prior expectations play an important role for proactive conflict control exemplified in the Gratton, or the congruency sequence effect (CSE). Here, we examine proactive cognitive-emotional conflict control in ASD compared to neuro-typical controls and the underlying neurophysiological and functional neuroanatomical processes using EEG methods and an emotional Stroop task with sequentially manipulated trial transitions. We show that, in ASD the presence of cognitive-emotional conflict in a previous trial affects the ability to process emotional conflict in a subsequent trial. That is, ASD individuals show a prominent CSE effect on emotional stimuli while neuro-typical controls do not. The neurophysiological data revealed that this proactive reconfiguration of stimulus-response associations during conflict resolution is associated with activation within anterior cingulate (BA24 and 32) and insular cortices (BA13). Purely perceptual, attentional and motor response-related processes could not explain these effects. Our results suggest that when faced with cognitive-emotional conflict, ASD individuals seem to rely on their subjective expectation about an upcoming trial type independent of the objective likelihood of that upcoming trial transition. The present results lend support to theoretical propositions on precision weighting of prediction error in ASD and have theoretical and clinical implications in the context of cognitive-emotional regulation and conflict control.

自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的特点是一系列挑战，包括认知和社会情感差异，以及难以适应无法预测的情况的困难。最近有人提出，患有自闭症的人对即将发生的事件抱有严格的期望，这些事件往往由未来不太可能重复的信息所影响。先前的期望对于主动冲突控制（例如Gratton或全顺序列效应（CSE））起着重要作用。在这里，我们检查了ASD中的主动型认知-情绪冲突控制与神经型控制以及使用EEG方法和具有顺序操纵的试验过渡的情绪化Stroop任务的潜在神经生理和功能神经解剖过程的比较。我们证明 在ASD中，先前试验中认知-情绪冲突的存在会影响后续试验中处理情绪冲突的能力。也就是说，ASD个体在情绪刺激上显示出显着的CSE效果，而神经型对照则没有。神经生理学数据表明，在冲突解决过程中，这种刺激-反应关联的主动重构与前扣带回（BA24和32）和岛状皮层（BA13）的激活有关。纯粹的感知，注意力和运动反应相关的过程无法解释这些影响。我们的结果表明，面对认知-情绪冲突时，ASD个人似乎依赖于他们对即将进行的试验类型的主观期望，而与即将进行的试验过渡的客观可能性无关。