Adults with Autism Tend to Undermine the Hidden Environmental Structure: Evidence from a Visual Associative Learning Task

Sapey-Triomphe, Laurie-Anne; Sonié, Sandrine; Hénaff, Marie-Anne; Mattout, Jérémie; Schmitz, Christina

doi:10.1007/s10803-018-3574-1

Original Paper
Published: 13 April 2018

Adults with Autism Tend to Undermine the Hidden Environmental Structure: Evidence from a Visual Associative Learning Task

Laurie-Anne Sapey-Triomphe¹,
Sandrine Sonié^1,2,3,
Marie-Anne Hénaff¹,
Jérémie Mattout¹^na1 &
Christina Schmitz ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8377-9608¹^na1

Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders volume 48, pages 3061–3074 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

The learning-style theory of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) (Qian, Lipkin, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 5:77, 2011) states that ASD individuals differ from neurotypics in the way they learn and store information about the environment and its structure. ASD would rather adopt a lookup-table strategy (LUT: memorizing each experience), while neurotypics would favor an interpolation style (INT: extracting regularities to generalize). In a series of visual behavioral tasks, we tested this hypothesis in 20 neurotypical and 20 ASD adults. ASD participants had difficulties using the INT style when instructions were hidden but not when instructions were revealed. Rather than an inability to use rules, ASD would be characterized by a disinclination to generalize and infer such rules.

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10 May 2018
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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all of the participants for their precious time, participation, feedbacks on the tasks, and enriching conversations. We also thank Nathalie Touil and Lucie Hannequin for taking care of the WAIS assessments of most of the participants, and for the interesting discussions about WAIS interpretation.

Funding

This study was supported by a Scientific Research Council grant from the Vinatier Hospital Center, and was performed within the framework of the LABEX CORTEX (ANR-11-LABX-0042) of Université de Lyon, within the program “Investissements d’Avenir” (ANR-11-IDEX-0007) operated by the French National Research Agency (ANR).

Author information

Jérémie Mattout and Christina Schmitz have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, Brain Dynamics and Cognition Team, INSERM UMRS 1028, CNRS UMR 5292, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Université de Lyon, 69000, Lyon, France
Laurie-Anne Sapey-Triomphe, Sandrine Sonié, Marie-Anne Hénaff, Jérémie Mattout & Christina Schmitz
Centre de Ressource Autisme Rhône-Alpes, Centre Hospitalier Le Vinatier, Bron, France
Sandrine Sonié
Hôpital Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, Lyon, France
Sandrine Sonié

Authors

Laurie-Anne Sapey-Triomphe
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Sandrine Sonié
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Marie-Anne Hénaff
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Jérémie Mattout
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Christina Schmitz
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Contributions

Paradigms were designed by LAST, MAH, JM and CS, participants were recruited by SS, data collection and analyses were performed by LAST, the article was written by LAST, JM and CS. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Christina Schmitz.

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All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest to disclose.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in this study were in accordance with the standards of the French ethical guidelines and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Approval was obtained from the local ethics committee (French South East IV Committee for the Protection of Persons).

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Sapey-Triomphe, LA., Sonié, S., Hénaff, MA. et al. Adults with Autism Tend to Undermine the Hidden Environmental Structure: Evidence from a Visual Associative Learning Task. J Autism Dev Disord 48, 3061–3074 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3574-1

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Published: 13 April 2018
Issue Date: September 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3574-1

Keywords

Autism
Perception
Categorization
Learning
Local and global processing