Autistic Adults Show Intact Learning on a Visuospatial Serial Reaction Time Task

Autistic Adults Show Intact Learning on a Visuospatial Serial Reaction Time Task

Some theories have proposed that autistic individuals have difficulty learning predictive relationships. We tested this hypothesis using a serial reaction time task in which participants learned to predict the locations of a repeating sequence of target locations. We conducted a large-sample online...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of autism and developmental disorders Vol. 54; no. 4; pp. 1549 - 1557
Main Authors: Treves, Isaac N., Cannon, Jonathan, Shin, Eren, Li, Cindy E., Bungert, Lindsay, O’Brien, Amanda, Cardinaux, Annie, Sinha, Pawan, Gabrieli, John D. E.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York Springer US 01-04-2024
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Autism
Autistic adults
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Child and School Psychology
Hypotheses
Learning
Memory
Neurosciences
Original Paper
Pediatrics
Psychology
Public Health
Reaction time
Reaction time task
Sequences
SRT task
Autism
Procedural learning
Prediction
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Summary:Some theories have proposed that autistic individuals have difficulty learning predictive relationships. We tested this hypothesis using a serial reaction time task in which participants learned to predict the locations of a repeating sequence of target locations. We conducted a large-sample online study with 61 autistic and 71 neurotypical adults. The autistic group had slower overall reaction times, but demonstrated sequence-specific learning equivalent to the neurotypical group, consistent with other findings of typical procedural memory in autism. The neurotypical group, however, made significantly more prediction-related errors early in the experiment when the stimuli changed from repeated sequences to random locations, suggesting certain limited behavioural differences in the learning or utilization of predictive relationships for autistic adults.
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ISSN:0162-3257
1573-3432
DOI:10.1007/s10803-023-05894-y