Enhanced visual statistical learning in adults with autism.

Abstract

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are often characterized as having social engagement and language deficiencies, but a sparing of visuo-spatial processing and short-term memory, with some evidence of supra-normal levels of performance in these domains. The present study expanded on this evidence by investigating the observational learning of visuospatial concepts from patterns of covariation across multiple exemplars. Child and adult participants with ASD, and age-matched control participants, viewed multi-shape arrays composed from a random combination of pairs of shapes that were each positioned in a fixed spatial arrangement. After this passive exposure phase, a post-test revealed that all participant groups could discriminate pairs of shapes with high covariation from randomly paired shapes with low covariation. Moreover, learning these shape-pairs with high covariation was superior in adults with ASD than in age-matched controls, while performance in children with ASD was no different than controls. These results extend previous observations of visuospatial enhancement in ASD into the domain of learning, and suggest that enhanced visual statistical learning may have arisen from a sustained bias to attend to local details in complex arrays of visual features.

Disentangling signal and noise in autism spectrum disorder

“…A recent study by Spanò, Peterson, Nadel, Rhoads, and Edgin (2015) convincingly showed that children with ASD use both low-level priors (on convexity and surface integration) and higher level priors (based on form/ object memories) in a basic visual figure-ground segregation task, to the same extent as typically developing children. As pointed out before, even probabilistic and implicit regularities can be learned in ASD (e.g., Nemeth et al, 2010;Roser, Aslin, McKenzie, Zahra, & Fiser, 2015;Solomon, Smith, Frank, Ly, & Carter, 2011). If the task makes clear which stimuli or dimensions are relevant, people with ASD may even be more sensitive to changes in environmental patterns (Westerfield, Zinni, Vo, & Townsend, 2015) as seen in the P3 ERP component, consistent with our proposal of increased precision of prediction errors.…”

The multi-component nature of statistical learning

“…The findings reported by Roser et al [62] revealed intact SL in individuals with ASD-as well as a somewhat surprising finding of superior SL in adults with ASD by comparison with a control group of adults. Superior SL in individuals with ASD was not observed in the child data.…”

“…Departing from a focus on sequential SL in many of the other studies in this area, Roser and co-workers examined the detection of spatial regularities in those with and without ASD [62]. If SL is comprised of multiple components, it is reasonable to expect that (at least some of) these components process spatial regularities differently from sequential regularities.…”

“…Superior SL in individuals with ASD was not observed in the child data. The authors acknowledged their modest sample sizes and stated that their study 'does not allow for the full heterogeneity of the ASD spectrum to be represented' ( [62], p. 169). They also noted that studies that rely solely on group-level comparisons, such as theirs, are not the most effective way to examine individual differences.…”

Cognitive control and episodic memory in adolescents with autism spectrum disorders

“…Thus, encoding while making this form of judgment may have contributed less effectively to the otherwise typical deep encoding found in individuals with ASD (Toichi and Kamio, 2002; Mottron et al, 2001). Findings of intact recognition of items encoded relationally, on the other hand, suggests that those with ASD were relatively better at recognizing items under conditions involving their strong visuospatial information processing abilities (Joseph et al, 2005; Roser et al, 2015; Caron et al, 2006). We are not the first to observe that stimulus characteristics influence how effectively items can be encoded (Gaigg et al, 2008).…”