Cognitive processing limitations in children with autism

There have been studies showing that autistic individuals have an executive function deficit. By analyzing the tasks in executive function tests such as Wisconsin Card Sorting and Tower of Hanoi (TOH), I proposed that the executive function tasks require two subareas of more basic cognitive abilities: breadth of representation and continuity of processing.; The first experiment of the present study was designed to examine whether autistic children were impaired on the breadth of representation and, if so, whether the impairment was a reason for autistic children's failure on the executive function tasks.; The participants of the first experiment were ten autistic and control boy pairs recruited from Beijing, China. Their verbal mental ages were 6 or more years. The two members of each pair were strictly matched on chronological age and verbal mental age.; The autistic children and controls' executive function was tested by TOH, their breadth of representation was tested by the Standard Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) and Comprehension of Metaphors (CM). The participants' theory of mind and perception-memory were also tested.; Although the autistic children did not perform significantly more poorly than controls on both TOH and RPM, the cognitive profile of the autistic group was significantly different from the control group's. Comparing the two profiles revealed that autistic children were weak on those tasks that required abstract thinking (CM) and strong on perception-memory. Their fundamental deficit seemed to be the abstract thinking. The group difference in the discrepancy between abstract thinking and perception-memory was significant and distinguished autistic children from controls with an 85% accuracy.; The second experiment was designed to confirm the findings of the first experiment. Another ten autistic and control boy pairs participated. They were matched in the same manner as in experiment I and their perception-memory was tested with the same test, while the abstract thinking test was better developed. The findings of the first experiment was confirmed. The author believes that the discrepancy between abstract thinking and perception-memory can explain autistic children's social, communication, and behavioral characteristics.