Prototypical category learning in high‐functioning autism

Vladusich, Tony; Olu-Lafe, Olufemi; Kim, Dae‐Shik; Tager–Flusberg, Helen; Grossberg, Stephen

doi:10.1002/aur.148

Cited by 46 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Two previous studies (Church et al, 2010; Vladusich et al, 2010) have utilized a random dot pattern task to examine prototype formation in autism. As mentioned above, the fact that both tasks provided feedback to participants about whether each stimulus had been accurately categorized could have interfered with learning.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Church et al (2010) and Vladusich et al (2010) used the random dot pattern task or a variation of it, but participants were trained with corrective feedback after making a response. Maddox et al (2008) demonstrated that feedback can actually hurt learning of perceptual categories, such as in the random dot pattern task, by engaging the neural system supporting explicit, rule-based category learning.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Intact prototype formation but impaired generalization in autism

Froehlich

Anderson

Bigler

et al. 2012

Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders

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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.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intact prototype formation but impaired generalization in autism

Froehlich

Anderson

Bigler

et al. 2012

Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…However, even when apparently normal categorization is observed, individuals with high-functioning ASD (HFASD) showed impairments in learning or generalization (Bott et al, 2006;Gastgeb et al, 2012;Froehlich et al, 2012;Soulières et al, 2011;Vladusich et al, 2010), differences in brain activity (Schipul, 2012), or subgroups who showed abnormal generalization (Molesworth et al, 2008), suggesting that the neural mechanisms or processes involved may differ. This contrasts with relatively consistent findings of spared simple explicit rule formation and implicit associative/statistical learning in individuals with ASD (e.g., Brown, Aczel, Jimenez, Kaufman, & Grant, 2010, contextual cueing, serial reaction time, artificial grammar learning, and probabilistic classification; Klinger and Dawson, 2001, single-dimensional rules).…”

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confidence: 99%

Learning, plasticity, and atypical generalization in children with autism

et al. 2015

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Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show accelerated learning in some tasks, degraded learning in others, and distinct deficits when generalizing to novel situations. Recent simulations with connectionist models suggest that deficits in cortical plasticity mechanisms can account for atypical patterns of generalization shown by some children with ASD. We tested the surprising theoretical prediction, from past simulations, that the children with ASD who show atypical generalization in perceptual categorization tasks will benefit more from training with a single prototypical member of the category than from training with multiple examples, but children with ASD who generalize normally will be comparatively harmed. The experimental results confirmed this prediction, suggesting that plasticity deficits may well underlie the difficulties that some children with ASD have generalizing skills, and these deficits are not specific to the acquisition of social skills, but rather reflect a more general perceptual learning deficit that may impact many abilities.

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“…Individuals with autism in general appear equally subject to the influence of prototypes as control participants (e.g. Gastgeb et al, 2006;Molesworth, Bowler, & Hampton, 2005;Vladusich, Lafe, Kim, Tager-Flusberg, & Grossberg, 2010). One study that modeled categorization performance with a quantitative exemplar model, the general context model (GCM, Nosofsky, 1986) reported no differences between an ASD group and control group.…”

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confidence: 99%

Children with autism do not show sequence effects with auditory stimuli.

Molesworth¹,

Chevallier²,

Happé³

et al. 2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Connor, 1970;Rimland, 1964;Scheerer, Rothmann, & Goldstein, 1945). Some researchers have suggested that such difficulties may underpin or exacerbate difficulties processing social information (Gastgeb, Strauss, & Minshew, 2006;Klinger & Dawson, 1995). For example, a father struggled to teach his son with autism to stay away from strangers (Klinger & Dawson, 1995). Nosofsky, 1986) reported no differences between an ASD group and control group. Permanent repository linkOnce trained to criterion both participant groups categorized test phase items with similar accuracy and discriminated similarly between memory traces for exemplars (Bott, Brock, Brockdorff, Boucher, & Lamberts, 2006 Evidence that absolute magnitude information is not used comes from estimates of tone loudness, for example. These reflect the perceived magnitude of previous tones (i.e. sequence effects) rather than absolute magnitude information (Baird, Green, & Luce, 1980). To illustrate the influence of sequence effects on categorization, Stewart et al. (2002) designed the category contrast effect task. This paradigm uses stimuli comprising ten auditory tones (Tone 1 to Tone 10) spaced along a unidimensional continuum of pitch. Each tone represents a constant increase in perceived pitch that is associated with an increase in sound frequency by a constant ratio (Krumhansl, 2000;Shepard, 1982). Tones were presented in sequence and with feedback participants learnt to categorize them into two categories; low pitch (the five lowest tones) versus high pitch (the five highest tones).The key variable was response accuracy to the two tones closest to category boundary (Tone 5 and Tone 6). Each boundary tone was preceded by a distant tone (Tone 1 or Tone 10). the participant learns that one tone is "high", and the next tone is even higher, they know that tone will be high too. If the next tone is lower than the high tone, their decision will depend on the magnitude of perceptual difference between the current and preceding tone. For small changes, they are likely to repeat the original response, but larger changes induce a switch in category label. These strategies produce contrast effects in sequential stimuli. Difficulties have also been observed with verbal stimuli and context unfolding over time such as during homograph tasks (Frith & Snowling, 1983;Happé, 1997). These require the participant to read aloud either frequent or infrequent pronunciations of homographs embedded within a sentence that provides context (e.g. "In her eye / dress there was a big tear", Happé, 1997). Participants with autism show a tendency to produce contextually inappropriate frequent pronunciations of homographs. SEQUENCE EFFECTS IN autism SEQUENCE EFFECTS IN autismThese findings are captured by a general explanation of cognitive processing in SEQUENCE EFFECTS IN autism 7 autism, the weak central coherence account (Frith, 1989;Happé, 1994a). Frith (1989) co...

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Prototypical category learning in high‐functioning autism

Cited by 46 publications

References 40 publications

Intact prototype formation but impaired generalization in autism

Intact prototype formation but impaired generalization in autism

Learning, plasticity, and atypical generalization in children with autism

Children with autism do not show sequence effects with auditory stimuli.

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