Perceptual similarity in autism

Bott, Lewis ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4926-1231, Brock, Jon, Brockdorff, Noellie, Boucher, Jill and Lamberts, Koen 2006. Perceptual similarity in autism. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 59 (7) , pp. 1237-1254. 10.1080/02724980543000196

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Abstract

People with autism have consistently been found to outperform controls on visuo-spatial tasks such as block design, embedded figures, and visual search tasks. Plaisted, O'Riordan, and others (Bonnel et al., 2003; O'Riordan & Plaisted, 2001; O'Riordan, Plaisted, Driver, & Baron-Cohen, 2001; Plaisted, O'Riordan, & Baron-Cohen, 1998a, 1998b) have suggested that these findings might be explained in terms of reduced perceptual similarity in autism, and that reduced perceptual similarity could also account for the difficulties that people with autism have in making generalizations to novel situations. In this study, high-functioning adults with autism and ability-matched controls performed a low-level categorization task designed to examine perceptual similarity. Results were analysed using standard statistical techniques and modelled using a quantitative model of categorization. This analysis revealed that participants with autism required reliably longer to learn the category structure than did the control group but, contrary to the predictions of the reduced perceptual similarity hypothesis, no evidence was found of more accurate performance by the participants with autism during the generalization stage. Our results suggest that when all participants are attending to the same attributes of an object in the visual domain, people with autism will not display signs of enhanced perceptual similarity.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
ISSN:	1747-0218
Last Modified:	18 Oct 2022 13:05
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/12267

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