Implicit Learning Performance Of Children With High-functioning Autism Aged 8 To 15 Years Old In The Contextual Cueing Task

Implicit learning was related to the language,motion skills and social interactive development of children with autism spectrum disorder(ASD).Studying on implicit learning performance of children with ASD will have an effect on revealing the mechanism for the core symptoms.At present,it is still controversial whether there is a deficit in the implicit learnig of children with ASD,and the previous studies mainly focus on non-social field.Contextual cueing(CC)task represents a classical paradigm that has been used to exmaine the implicit learning of individuals,and the type of cues was a very important factor for using this task.The findings of contextual cueing task in the non-social field shown that there is no difficulty with implicit learning in children with ASD,but these studies mainly examined the implicit learning performance of spatial cues in autistic children.It remains unclear whether identity cues have different effects on the implicit learning of children with ASD.In addition,there is also need systematic research on the implicit learning performance of different types of cues for children with ASD in the social field.Based on the contextual cueing task paradigm,this study examined the performance of implicit learning in children with high-functioning autism in the social contextual cueing task and unsocial contextual cueing task.Meantime,to explore whether spatial cues and stimulus-identity cues have different effect on implicit learning performance of children with ASD,which contribute to find the key reasons for the abnormal implicit learning of autistic children.Additionally,the current study investigated the correlation between the score of the social responsiveness scale of children with high-functioning autism and their implicit learning performance to explore the reasons for the formation of the core symptoms of social interactions and communication disorder in children with ASD.The current studies include four parts:Study one includes two experiments to examine the implicit learning developmental models and the implicit learning performance of children aged 8 to 15 years old in social and non-social field.In Experiment 1,real-life object pictures were used to compile a contextual cueing task,and the results showed that all participants show a robust implicit learning in this contextual cueing task.In Experiment 2,we used a contextual cueing task with real-life child pictures stimuli and the results showed that similar implicit learning performance was observed in three TD groups.These results demonstrated that the contextual cueing task with object pictures stimuli and child pictures stimuli are suitable for investigating the implicit learning performance of children aged 8 to 15 years old.The development trajectory of implicit learning performance in the non-social contextual cueing task is consistent with the Model 1,but the development trajectory of implicit learning performance in the social contextual cueing task in align with the Model 3.Study two also contains two experiments.They examined the implicit learning performance of children with high-functioning autism in the CC task with object pictures under identity cues and multiple cues condition separately.The findings demonstrated that when provid identity cues or multiple cues,children with highfunctioning autism showed successful implicit learning in this non-social CC task,only the learning speed is slow.It means that identity cues and spatial cues did not have different effect on the implicit learning performance of children with high-functioning autism in the unsocial contextual cueing task.Study three examined the implicit learning performance of children with highfunctioning autism in the CC task with the child pictures under identity cues and multiple cues condition separately.The findings demonstrated that when provid identity cues,children with high-functioning autism showed successful implicit learning in this task,also the learning speed is slow.However,when provid multiple cues,children with high-functioning autism have difficulty with implicit learning in this CC task.It means that identity cues and spatial cues differentially affect the implicit learning performance of children with high-functioning autism in the social contextual cueing task.Study four investigated the correlation between implicit learning performance of children with high-functioning autism in four contextual cueing tasks and their scores of the Social Responsiveness Scale(SRS).No significant correlations were found between the SRS total score in the ASD group and their implicit learning performance,but there is a significant positive correlation between social awareness subscale scores and implicit learning performance of children with ASD in non-social task with spatial cues and stimulus-identity cues,as well as social awareness subscale scores and implicit learning performance of children with ASD in social task with stimulus-identity cues.In summary,two contextual cueing tasks with object pictures stimuli and child pictures stimuli separately were suitable for investigating the implicit learning performance of children aged 8-15 years old.The development trajectory of implicit learning performance in those two contextual cueing tasks in line with different development models of implicit learning.Importantly,children with high-functioning autism had difficulty with implicit learning in the contextual cueing task with social stimuli.Also,spatial cues and stimulus-identity cues differently affect their implicit learning performance in the social contextual cueing task,and this effect will be adjusted by the selective attention and perception processing style of children with ASD.In addition,no significant correlation between the implicit learning performance of high-functioning autistic children in the non-social contextual cueing task and social contextual cueing task and their the SRS total score were found,but the relationship between social awareness and implicit learning is significant.Overall,there is an abnormality in the implicit learning of children with high-functioning autism aged 8 to15-year-olds in the social field.