Learning, plasticity, and atypical generalization in children with autism

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show accelerated learning in some tasks, degraded learning in others, and distinct deficits when generalizing to novel situations. Recent simulations with connectionist models suggest that deficits in cortical plasticity mechanisms can account for atypical patterns of generalization shown by some children with ASD. We tested the surprising theoretical prediction, from past simulations, that the children with ASD who show atypical generalization in perceptual categorization tasks will benefit more from training with a single prototypical member of the category than from training with multiple examples, but children with ASD who generalize normally will be comparatively harmed. The experimental results confirmed this prediction, suggesting that plasticity deficits may well underlie the difficulties that some children with ASD have generalizing skills, and these deficits are not specific to the acquisition of social skills, but rather reflect a more general perceptual learning deficit that may impact many abilities.