Transitive Inference in a Clinical Childhood Sample

Abstract

Background: Transitive inference has a long history of study in developmental contexts. However, trial-and-error transitive inference learning (in which participants infer item relations, rather than evaluate them explicitly from verbal descriptions) has been the subject of minimal study in childhood samples with reported clinical diagnoses.Methods: Children aged 8 to 10 underwent a battery of clinical assessments and received a range of diagnoses, potentially including autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention-deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD), anxiety disorders (AD), specific learning disorders (SLD), and/or communication disorders (CD). Participants also performed a simple trial-and-error learning task that tested for transitive inference. Response accuracy and reaction time were assessed in a statistical model that controlled for diagnostic comorbidity at the group level.Results: Participants in all diagnostic categories showed evidence of transitive inference, and thus succeeded at the task. However, a model comparison analysis suggested that those diagnosed with ASD succeeded in a qualitatively different way, responding more slowly to each choice and improving faster across trials than their non-ASD counterparts. Additionally, transitive inference performance was not associated with IQ. Overall, our data suggest that superficially similar performance levels between ASD and non-ASD participants may have resulted from a difference in the speed-accuracy tradeoff made by each group.Conclusions: This provides a preliminary profile of the impact of various clinical diagnoses on TI performance in young children. Of these, an ASD diagnosis resulted in the largest difference in task strategy.