Autistic Adults Show Intact Learning on a Visuospatial Serial Reaction Time Task.

ABSTRACT: Some theories have proposed that autistic individuals have difficulty learning predictive relationships. We tested this hypothesis using a serial reaction time task in which participants learned to predict the locations of a repeating sequence of target locations. We conducted a large-sample online study with 61 autistic and 71 neurotypical adults. The autistic group had slower overall reaction times, but demonstrated sequence-specific learning equivalent to the neurotypical group, consistent with other findings of typical procedural memory in autism. The neurotypical group, however, made significantly more prediction-related errors early in the experiment when the stimuli changed from repeated sequences to random locations, suggesting certain limited behavioural differences in the learnin

SUBMITTER: Treves IN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10981634 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature