Skoyles John R
Centre for Mathematics and Physics in the Life Sciences and Experimental Biology (CoMPLEX), University College London, London NW1 2HE, UK.
Autism Res Treat. 2011;2011:681627. doi: 10.1155/2011/681627. Epub 2011 Aug 14.
Autism has been attributed to a deficit in contextual information processing. Attempts to understand autism in terms of such a defect, however, do not include more recent computational work upon context. This work has identified that context information processing depends upon the extraction and use of the information hidden in higher-order (or indirect) associations. Higher-order associations underlie the cognition of context rather than that of situations. This paper starts by examining the differences between higher-order and first-order (or direct) associations. Higher-order associations link entities not directly (as with first-order ones) but indirectly through all the connections they have via other entities. Extracting this information requires the processing of past episodes as a totality. As a result, this extraction depends upon specialised extraction processes separate from cognition. This information is then consolidated. Due to this difference, the extraction/consolidation of higher-order information can be impaired whilst cognition remains intact. Although not directly impaired, cognition will be indirectly impaired by knock on effects such as cognition compensating for absent higher-order information with information extracted from first-order associations. This paper discusses the implications of this for the inflexible, literal/immediate, and inappropriate information processing of autistic individuals.
自闭症被认为与情境信息处理缺陷有关。然而，试图从这种缺陷的角度来理解自闭症的研究，并未涵盖近期关于情境的计算研究工作。这项研究发现，情境信息处理依赖于对隐藏在高阶（或间接）关联中的信息的提取和运用。高阶关联是情境认知的基础，而非情境认知的基础。本文首先考察高阶关联与一阶（或直接）关联之间的差异。高阶关联并非像一阶关联那样直接连接实体，而是通过它们经由其他实体所具有的所有连接来间接连接实体。提取此类信息需要将过去的事件作为一个整体进行处理。因此，这种提取依赖于与认知分离的专门提取过程。然后，这些信息会被整合。由于这种差异，高阶信息的提取/整合可能会受损，而认知仍保持完好。虽然认知不会直接受损，但会因诸如认知用从一阶关联中提取的信息来补偿缺失的高阶信息等连锁效应而间接受损。本文讨论了这对自闭症个体刻板、字面/即时且不恰当的信息处理的影响。
