It is well established that children with autism often show outstanding visual search skills. To date, however, no study has tested whether these skills, usually assessed on a table-top or computer, translate to more true-to-life settings. One prominent account of autism, Baron-Cohen's "systemizing" theory, gives us good reason to suspect that they should. In this study, we tested whether autistic children's exceptional skills at small-scale search extend to a largescale environment and, in so doing, tested key claims of the systemizing account. Twenty school-age children with autism and 20 ageand ability-matched typical children took part in a large-scale search task in the "foraging room": a purpose-built laboratory, with numerous possible search locations embedded into the floor. Children were instructed to search an array of 16 (green) locations to find the hidden (red) target as quickly as possible. The distribution of target locations was manipulated so that they appeared on one side of the midline for 80% of trials. Contrary to predictions of the systemizing account, autistic children's search behavior was much less efficient than that of typical children: they showed reduced sensitivity to the statistical properties of the search array, and furthermore, their search patterns were strikingly less optimal and less systematic. The nature of large-scale search behavior in autism cannot therefore be explained by a facility for systemizing. Rather, children with autism showed difficulties exploring and exploiting the large-scale space, which might instead be attributed to constraints (rather than benefits) in their cognitive repertoire.autism spectrum conditions | navigation | spatial representation A utism is a common and often highly debilitating neurodevelopmental condition that is characterized by difficulties in social communication and repetitive and rigid patterns of behavior that are believed to be rooted in disrupted neurocognitive processes (1). Not all aspects of autistic cognition, however, are characterized by impairments in information processing. Rather, it is well established that people with autism show "islets of ability" (2). In particular, individuals with autism have been shown repeatedly to outperform typical children of similar age and ability on a range of visuospatial tasks. On classic visual search paradigms, children with autism are significantly faster than typical children at detecting a target (e.g., a red S) hidden among an array of distracters (e.g., a red T and a green X), particularly when search is more challenging and requires multiple shifts of attention (3)(4)(5).One important, yet hitherto unaddressed, question is whether this talent is advantageous to the daily lives of people with autism. Experimental investigations of the visual search advantage in autism have almost exclusively relied on behavioral paradigms designed for the computer or table top, which are presumed to represent the state of neurocognitive processes beyond the controlled test situation [although see C...
In linguistics, the relationship between phonological word form and meaning is mostly considered arbitrary. Why, then, do literary authors traditionally craft sound relationships between words? We set out to characterise how dynamic interactions between word form and meaning may account for this literary practice. Here, we show that alliteration influences both meaning integration and attentional engagement during reading. We presented participants with adjective-noun phrases, having manipulated semantic relatedness (congruent, incongruent) and form repetition (alliterating, non-alliterating) orthogonally, as in "dazzling-diamond"; "sparkling-diamond"; "dangerous-diamond"; and "creepy-diamond". Using simultaneous recording of event-related brain potentials and pupil dilation (PD), we establish that, whilst semantic incongruency increased N400 amplitude as expected, it reduced PD, an index of attentional engagement. Second, alliteration affected semantic evaluation of word pairs, since it reduced N400 amplitude even in the case of unrelated items (e.g., "dangerous-diamond"). Third, alliteration specifically boosted attentional engagement for related words (e.g., "dazzling-diamond"), as shown by a sustained negative correlation between N400 amplitudes and PD change after the window of lexical integration. Thus, alliteration strategically arouses attention during reading and when comprehension is challenged, phonological information helps readers link concepts beyond the level of literal semantics. Overall, our findings provide a tentative mechanism for the empowering effect of sound repetition in literary constructs.
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