Autistic Adults Show Intact Learning on a Visuospatial Serial Reaction Time Task.
Isaac N Treves, Jonathan Cannon, Eren Shin and 6 others
PMID 36641542WHAT IT FOUND
Autistic adults learned the visual sequence as well as neurotypical adults, despite slower reaction times.
Neurotypical adults made more errors early on by guessing based on the pattern. This suggests intact procedural learning in autism, challenging ideas of broad predictive deficits.
Key findings
01There was no significant difference in learning scores between the autistic and neurotypical groups.
02The autistic group had significantly slower overall reaction times than the neurotypical group.
03Neurotypical participants made more sequence-specific errors than autistic participants in the first random block after exposure to the repeating sequence.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study included only autistic adults with normal-to-high non-verbal IQ, so results may not apply to the broader autism spectrum. Only half of the participants received the explicit memory test. The online nature of the study lacked experimenter presence, which may have affected attention or fatigue levels.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the lack of early sequence-specific errors in autistic adults as a deficit in learning. The study found that autistic adults learned the sequence just as well as neurotypical adults; the difference was in how neurotypical adults over-applied the learned pattern during random trials.