Intact prototype formation but impaired generalization in autism

Abstract

Cognitive processing in autism has been characterized by a difficulty with the abstraction of information across multiple stimuli or situations and subsequent generalization to new stimuli or situations. This apparent difficulty leads to the suggestion that prototype formation, a process of creating a mental summary representation of multiple experienced stimuli that go together in a category, may be impaired in autism. Adults with high functioning autism and a typically developing comparison group matched on age and IQ completed a random dot pattern categorization task. Participants with autism demonstrated intact prototype formation in all four ways it was operationally defined, and this performance was not significantly different from that of control participants. However, participants with autism categorized dot patterns that were more highly distorted from the category prototypes less accurately than did control participants. These findings suggest, at least within the constraints of the random dot pattern task, that although prototype formation may not be impaired in autism, difficulties may exist with the generalization of what has been learned about a category to novel stimuli, particularly as they become less similar to the category’s prototype.

Beyond intervention into daily life: A systematic review of generalisation following social communication interventions for young children with autism

“…However, there have been few attempts to test the validity of these, or other theories of generalisation in autism and existing experimental studies are characterised by very disparate methodologies and inconsistent findings. Preliminary evidence from dot‐probe tasks [Bott, Brock, Brockdorff, Boucher, & Lamberts, ; Church et al, ; Froehlich et al, ; Mercado 3rd et al, ; Vladusich, Olu‐Lafe, Kim, Tager‐Flusberg, & Grossberg, ], labelling of objects and pictures [Hartley & Allen, , ] and transfer of cognitive strategies [de Marchena, Eigsti, & Yerys, ] present a varied picture of the extent of any specific difficulties in generalisation associated with autism. Such studies are also limited by their use of generalisation contexts that are very similar to those of the learning environment and the fact that generalisation is assessed almost immediately after learning.…”

Diminished neural adaptation during implicit learning in autism

“…Dot pattern categories are particularly useful stimuli in prototype learning studies, because they can be precisely controlled and are comparably familiar across participant groups. Again, results have been mixed in ASD, with evidence of both intact (Froehlich et al , 2012; Molesworth et al , 2005) and impaired (Church et al , 2010; Gastgeb, et al , 2011a; Vladusich et al , 2010) performance relative to neurotypical participants.…”

Ultra-Rapid Categorization of Meaningful Real-Life Scenes in Adults With and Without ASD

“…children and adults with ASD (Church et al 2010;Edwards et al 2012;Froehlich et al 2012). People with ASD may be less inclined to use the overall average similarity of the stimuli when making absolute categorical judgments and they have a larger number of small-sized and exemplarbased categories than their TD counterparts (Church et al 2010).…”