A Study On The Influencing Factors Of Category Learning In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism Spectrum Disorder is a widespread developmental Disorder that begins in infancy,it is characterized by deficits in social communication and interaction as well as repetitive and stereotyped behaviors or interests(American Psychiatric Association,2013).In addition to these core symptoms,there are also some differences in learning mechanisms and cognitive processes in children with autism.Previous studies have found that children with autism have both abilities and defects in category learning.However,few studies have pointed to what factors affect category learning in children with autism.Therefore,it is an urgent needs to explore what factors affect category learning of children with autism to promote cognitive rehabilitation of children with ASD.This research use the novel name generalization task.Study 1 mainly examined the effect of comparison on category learning of children with autism,study 1A examined object category,and study 1B examined relational category.The results show that comparison helps children with ASD to learn object category,but comparison has poor effect on learning position relational category.Therefore,on the basis of study 1A,study 2 further investigated the effect of conceptual distance between the learning stage and the test stage on the object category learning of children with autism.The results showed that in the object category learning task,the closer conceptual distance between the learning stage was more conducive to the category learning of children with autism.Study 3 aimed at improving the poor learning effect of ASD children’s position relation category in study 1b,and investigated the effect of position relation picture priming.The results show that adding position relation priming pictures can significantly improve performance in the learning of position relation category in children with autism.In this study,the following conclusions were drawn :(1)In the object category learning task,comparison can improve the rate of children with ASD choosing category matching options;However,in the position relational category task,comparison has limited effect on improving the selection of position relation category matching options for children with autism.(2)In the object category learning task,in the case of comparison,the closer conceptual distance between the learning stage helps children with autism better learn the object category.(3)In the position relation category learning task,the addition of position picture priming can help autistic children better learn position relation category.The results are discussed and explained in this study,which has certain theoretical significance and application value,and the limitation of the study and the future research direction are proposed.