Category learning in autism: Are some situations better than others?

Abstract

Autism is diagnosed according to atypical social-communication and repetitive behaviors. However, autistic individuals are also distinctive in the high variability of specific abilities such as learning. Having been characterized as experiencing great difficulty with learning, autistics have also been reported to learn spontaneously in exceptional ways. These contrasting accounts suggest that some situations may be better than others for learning in autism. We tested this possibility using a probabilistic category learning task with four learning situations differing either in feedback intensity or information presentation. Two learning situations compared high- versus low-intensity feedback, while two other learning situations without external feedback compared isolated sequentially presented information versus arrays of simultaneously presented information. We assessed the categorization and generalization performance of 54 autistic and 52 age-matched typical school-age children after they learned in different situations. We found that children in both groups were able to learn and generalize novel probabilistic categories in all four learning situations. However, across and within groups, autistic children were advantaged by simultaneously presented information while typical children were advantaged by high-intensity feedback when learning. These findings question some common aspects of autism interventions (e.g., frequent intense feedback, minimized simplified information), and underline the importance of improving our current understanding of how and when autistics learn optimally. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).