Categorization In Children With Autism

Categorization is a kind of important cognitive activity, through putting things into different categories, people can effectively organize knowledge about these things. Categorization is extremely important, it can reduce the memory load, make the individual focus on the most important aspects of objects,and ignore irrelevant details. Defects or specific of basic categorization ability will influence the individual understand of the world, acquire of language and master social information. Due to the unusual social communication and behavior patterns, lots of studies focus on how Autism individuals organize information. Understand autism children categorization features, can improve the concept structure and provide a theoretical basis to improve the way of information processing. Therefore, on the basis of existing relevant researches, this paper pay attention to how autism children categorize information of perception, what is autism children class concept categories features, and what are possible influencing factors.The study has 55 low-functioning autistic children aged 7-12 as the subject. On the one hand,this study investigates how autistic children use the perception information or the concept information to make categorizations, meanwhile, investigate how they use different category strategies. On the other hand, this study measures factors which may influence autistic children make categorizations. The results show that (1) children with autism perceptual categorization features: different grades school age autism children make no different in classify things according to color or shape, use shape to make categories is dominant, this trend is same to the normal children;In perceptual categorizations, autism children prefer to concrete perceptual features. Autism children according to concrete perceptual features to make categories are significantly frequent than abstract perceptual features; There is no significantly relevant with how autism children use perceptual categorization criteria and age as well as intelligence level. (2) children with autism conceptual categorization features:things of superordinate level concept are easier to sort than things of basic level; with the increase of grade, concept categorization ability of children with autism will gradually improve, although speed in slow; concept categorization ability of children with autism is significantly relevant with age and intelligence level. (3) children with autism use categorical criteria features:In general, autism children most prefer to make categories according to thematic relation criteria, then concept criteria, finally perceptual criteria; IQ has a significant effect on how children with autism categorization according to different criteria, a significant positive correlation with thematic relation criteria and concept criteria, a significantly negative correlation with perceptual criteria; age and grade has no significant relevant with how children with autism categorization according to different criteria.