An ongoing debate in developmental cognitive neuroscience is whether individuals with autism are able to learn prototypical category representations from multiple exemplars. Prototype learning and memory were examined in a group of high-functioning autistic boys and young men, using a classic paradigm in which participants learned to classify novel dot patterns into one of two categories. Participants were trained on distorted versions of category prototypes until they reached a criterion level of performance. During transfer testing, participants were shown the training items together with three novel stimulus sets manifesting variable levels of physical distortion (low, medium, or high distortion) relative to the unseen prototypes. Two experiments were conducted, differing only in the manner in which the physical distortions were defined. In the first experiment, a subset of autistic individuals learned categories more slowly than controls, accompanied by an overall diminution in transfer-testing performance. The autism group did, however, manifest a typical pattern of performance across the testing conditions, relative to controls. In the second experiment, group means did not differ statistically in either the training or testing phases. Taken together, these data indicate that high-functioning autistic individuals do not manifest gross deficits in prototypical category learning. A theoretical discussion is given in terms of how perceptual grouping may interact with category learning.

Much of synaesthesia research focused on colour, but not all cross-domain correspondences reported by synaesthetes are strictly sensory. For example, some synaesthetes personify letters and numbers, in additional to visualising them in colour. First reported in the 1890's, the phenomenon has been largely ignored by scientists for more than a century with the exception of a few single case reports. In the present study, we collected detailed self reports on grapheme personification using a questionnaire, providing us with a comprehensive description of the phenomenology of grapheme personification. Next, we documented the behavioural consequences of personifying graphemes using a congruity paradigm involving a gender judgement task; we also examined whether personification is associated with heightened empathy as measured using Empathy Quotient (EQ) and found substantial individual differences within our sample. Lastly, we present the first neuroimaging case study of personification, indicating that the precuneus activation previously seen in other synaesthesia studies may be implicated in the process. We propose that frameworks for understanding synaesthesia could be extended into other domains of cognition and that grapheme personification shares more in common with normal cognition than may be readily apparent. This benign form of hyper-mentalising may provide a unique point of view on one of the most central problems in human cognition -understanding others' state of mind.

There is considerable debate about whether people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are biased toward local information and whether this disrupts their ability to integrate two complex shapes elements into a single figure. Moreover, few have examined the relationship between integration ability and ASD symptom severity. Adolescent/adult males with ASD and age and IQ-matched controls were compared on their performance of a simple silhouette-to-shape matching task and a higher-order shape-integration task. Relative to basic silhouette-to-shape matching, ASD participants were disproportionately slower than controls on shape-integration. Moreover, this relative slowing correlated with increased symptom severity in ASD participants. These findings support the notion that integrating local information is disproportionately more challenging in ASD; this weakness may play a role in ASD symptomatology.