Date: Wednesday, February 18, 2026
Location: 46-3002 (Singleton Auditorium)

Speaker: Ralph Adolphs, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Biology, California Institute of Technology

Host: Dr. Ev Fedorenko

Talk title: Is autism a temporally stable trait?

Abstract: Autism is broadly defined and heterogeneous in its presentation, but widely assumed to be a temporally stable condition that is lifelong. In that respect, it might be like personality — a stable trait that could express itself variably depending on state and context. We investigated this idea across multiple samples of participants and longitudinally. We found that in-lab and remote-tested participants differ; that in general self-report questionnaires show large differences in temporal stability among their items; and that social attention biases appear trait-like, but modulated by anxiety. Taken together, the findings argue that some facets of an autistic phenotype are more trait-like than others.