Category Formation in Autism: Can Individuals With Autism Abstract Social and Non-social Visual Prototypes?
Year: 2010
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: There is a growing amount of evidence suggesting that individuals with autism have difficulty with categorization. One basic cognitive ability that is necessary for categorization and may underlie these difficulties is the ability to abstract and represent the categorical information with a central representation or prototype. The current study examined prototype formation abilities in individuals with autism with social (faces) and non-social (dot patterns) stimuli using behavioral methodologies and eye-tracking in high functioning adults with autism and matched controls. Individuals with autism were found to have difficulty forming prototypes of both faces and dot patterns. Relationships were found between performance on the prototype tasks and measures of intelligence, symptoms of autism, and measures of lower-level perceptual functioning in the individuals with autism. The eye-tracking data did not reveal any between group differences in the general pattern of attention to the faces or dot patterns during the familiarization period indicating that the difficulties with prototype formation were not due to attentional factors. The results of the current study are consistent with previous studies that have found a deficit in prototype formation and indicate that these deficits exist with both familiar social stimuli such as faces and novel non-social stimuli such as dot patterns.
Author: Holly Zajac Gastgeb
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2167129057