Adults with Autism Tend to Underestimate the Hidden Environmental Structure: Evidence from a Visual Associative Learning Task

Laurie-Anne Sapey-Triomphe (1) , Sandrine Sonié (1) , Marie-Anne Henaff (1) , Jeremie Mattout (1) , Christina Schmitz (1)

1 CRNL - Centre de recherche en neurosciences de Lyon - Lyon Neuroscience Research Center

The learning-style theory of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) (Qian and Lipkin 2011) states that individuals with ASD differ from neurotypics in the way they learn and store information about the environment and its structure. ASD would rather adopt a lookup-table strategy (LUT: memorizing each experience), while neurotypics would favor an interpolation style (INT: extracting regularities to generalize). In a series of visual behavioral tasks, we tested this hypothesis in 20 neurotypical and 20 ASD adults. ASD participants had difficulties using the INT style when instructions were hidden but not when instructions were revealed. Rather than an inability to use rules, ASD would be characterized by a disinclination to generalize and infer such rules.

Mots clés: local and global processing; learning; categorization; perception; autism

Domaines: Neurosciences [q-bio.NC]

Laurie-Anne Sapey-Triomphe, Sandrine Sonié, Marie-Anne Henaff, Jeremie Mattout, Christina Schmitz. Adults with Autism Tend to Underestimate the Hidden Environmental Structure: Evidence from a Visual Associative Learning Task. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2018, 48 (9), pp.3061-3074. ⟨10.1007/s10803-018-3574-1⟩. ⟨hal-02379240⟩