How does the everyday world feel to you?

No. Only a qualified clinician using a comprehensive evaluation can diagnose autism. This self-inventory produces a four-part resonance profile across social-cognitive processing, sensory sensitivity, cognitive style and routine, and interest depth and focus.

It cannot replace a clinical assessment, and a low score here does not rule out autism. Use the result as input for a conversation — with yourself, a trusted person, or a clinician — never as a verdict.

No. The 12 items, the 5-point response scale, the four-band scoring, and the six lens profiles are LifeByLogic's original construction, drawn from twenty years of peer-reviewed adult-autism research but not derived from any specific instrument. The four constructs are informed by the published literature (Lai 2014, Lai 2019, Hull 2017, Tavassoli 2014, Crane 2009), but the items themselves are written in original LifeByLogic voice and have no verbatim or close-paraphrase correspondence to RAADS-14, RAADS-R, AQ, AQ-10, EQ, SQ, CAT-Q, RBQ-2A, AdAS, GSQ, or SPQ items.

If you would like to take a research-validated screen, the RAADS-14 paper (Eriksson et al., 2013, open access under CC BY 2.0) and the AQ paper (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001) are publicly available.

Treat it as a structured way to notice patterns, not as a measurement. The four constructs the self-inventory covers are well-established in the adult-autism literature; the specific items, score bands, and lens profiles haven't been independently validated.

The self-inventory is most useful when its result becomes input for a conversation — with yourself, a trusted person, or a clinician — rather than a verdict. Many users find it most informative to retake it after a few weeks; the change between attempts often reflects new memory or self-recognition that surfaced in the interval.

No. Many autistic adults — particularly women, people of color, and those who have spent years masking or compensating — score low on screening tools and identify the pattern only after deeper evaluation. Hull et al. (2017) describe how decades of social camouflaging can make present-day self-report unreliable in this population: the patterns are masked even from the person experiencing them.

A low score is not a clean bill. If specific items resonated strongly even though the overall pattern didn't, that resonance is information worth holding.

No. A high score means the four constructs reflected on resonate with your present-day experience. That resonance is consistent with autism, but it is also consistent with sensory processing sensitivity (Aron & Aron, 1997), ADHD (Lai et al., 2019 found 28–44% comorbidity), social anxiety disorder, complex trauma, and chronic burnout — alone or in combination.

A clinician's evaluation can help disentangle what's underneath the pattern. The lens profile may be more informative than the total score, because it shows the shape of the response rather than its magnitude.

Social-Cognitive Processing covers how social information gets read, predicted, and adapted to — theory of mind, intent inference, conversational pacing, and the explicit learning of social rituals.

Sensory and Environmental Sensitivity covers sensory thresholds, overwhelm patterns, and recovery time after high-stimulation environments.

Cognitive Style and Routine covers pattern preference, change response, and detail-vs-gestalt orientation.

Interest Depth and Focus covers the intensity of focused interest, flow patterns, and the cost of focus-shifting. All four are well-established in the adult-autism research literature.

The peer-reviewed adult-autism literature converges on these four as the most consistently reported areas across adult presentations. The RAADS-14 (Eriksson 2013) uses three (mentalizing, social anxiety, sensory). The AQ (Baron-Cohen 2001) uses five. Lai et al.'s (2014, 2019) Lancet reviews discuss four broad areas across social communication, sensory experience, cognitive style, and interest patterns.

Four is a defensible compromise that maps to how adults actually report their experiences and produces equal-weight construct contribution (3 items per construct, all weighted equally) — which the RAADS-14's unequal subscale lengths (7/4/3) do not.

A five-point scale (with a true midpoint) gives adults who have spent years adapting room to mark "it depends on the day" honestly, rather than forcing a binary. Adult-autism research (Hull et al., 2017) suggests masking often makes binary self-report unreliable in this population; a midpoint helps.

The five-point scale also differs deliberately from the RAADS-14's four-point lifetime-time-frame scale ("Never / Past only / Now only / Always") — the LBL-AAS's anchors are present-tense resonance, which avoids the contested age-of-onset question and makes the self-inventory appropriate for adults whose memory of childhood patterns is uncertain.

No. The self-inventory runs entirely in your browser via client-side JavaScript. Nothing is transmitted to LifeByLogic servers, nothing is stored in cookies, localStorage, or sessionStorage, and nothing is logged. Closing the tab erases all responses. We can't see your answers because we never receive them.

The only data sent to our analytics is an anonymized event marking that someone completed the self-inventory (and which band — Band 1 through Band 4 — they landed in), with IP anonymization enabled. No individual responses are ever transmitted.

Yes. Many adults find that scores shift over weeks or months as the framework becomes more familiar and as they remember experiences they didn't remember the first time. If your score changes substantially between attempts, the change itself is informative — it often means new memories or new self-recognition surfaced between the attempts.

Some users find it useful to take the self-inventory once, hold the result for two to four weeks while reading more about adult autism, and then retake it. The shift between attempts is often where the most useful information lives.

Three options, in order of usefulness: hold the result for a few days and notice whether specific items keep coming back to mind; talk with someone who knows you well about whether the lens profile fits how they see you; if the self-inventory raised genuine concerns, consider a conversation with a clinician experienced in adult autism evaluation. Skip steps if a step doesn't fit you.

The most common mistake is treating the score as a conclusion rather than a starting question. The score is the beginning of the inquiry, not its end.

The Lai et al. (2014, 2019) reviews in The Lancet and Lancet Psychiatry are the most accessible peer-reviewed overviews of adult autism. For lived-experience perspectives, books such as Unmasking Autism (Devon Price, 2022) and Aspergirls (Rudy Simone, 2010) are commonly recommended.

The Autistic Self Advocacy Network is a community resource often aligned with neurodiversity-affirming framing. Embrace Autism maintains clinician directories and additional research-grade screening instruments. The AANE (Asperger / Autism Network) provides adult-focused resources and support groups.

Lai et al.'s (2019) systematic review of psychiatric comorbidity in autism reports the most common co-occurring conditions as: anxiety disorders (~42% of autistic adults), ADHD (28–44% — the AuDHD pattern), depression (lifetime prevalence ~37%, roughly twice the general population rate), and sleep disorders (50–80%).

OCD (~22%), eating disorders (particularly restrictive subtypes in late-diagnosed women, per Mandy & Tchanturia 2015), and PTSD (~15–32% in adult samples) also co-occur at elevated rates. A self-inventory that resonates strongly across multiple domains often points to a multi-condition picture; a clinician's evaluation can help disentangle which patterns deserve which framework.

The RAADS-14 is a research-validated 14-item screening instrument (Eriksson et al., 2013) released under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0. It uses three subscales (mentalizing, social anxiety, sensory), a 4-point lifetime-time-frame response scale, a 0–42 score range, a published cutoff of 14 for a positive screen, and includes one reverse-scored item (item 6).

The Adult Autism Self-Inventory is LifeByLogic's original tool: 12 items across four constructs (adding interest depth and focus), a 5-point present-tense response scale, a 0–48 score range, no clinical cutoff, no reverse-scored items, and a salience-fraction lens-profile system that the RAADS-14 does not have.

The two tools cover overlapping construct territory but use different items, different scoring math, and different interpretive frameworks. If you want a research-validated screen, take the RAADS-14. If you want LifeByLogic's educational construct map, take this. They are complementary, not competitive.