Williams Diane L, Minshew Nancy J, Goldstein Gerald
Duquesne University, USA.
University of Pittsburgh, USA.
Autism. 2015 Oct;19(7):859-67. doi: 10.1177/1362361315586171. Epub 2015 May 27.
More than 20 years ago, Minshew and colleagues proposed the Complex Information Processing model of autism in which the impairment is characterized as a generalized deficit involving multiple modalities and cognitive domains that depend on distributed cortical systems responsible for higher order abilities. Subsequent behavioral work revealed a related dissociation between concept formation and concept identification in autism suggesting the lack of an underlying organizational structure to manage increases in processing loads. The results of a recent study supported the impact of this relative weakness in conceptual reasoning on adaptive functioning in children and adults with autism. In this study, we provide further evidence of the difficulty relatively able older adolescents and adults with autism have with conceptual reasoning and provide evidence that this characterizes their difference from age- and ability-matched controls with typical development better than their differences in language. For verbal adults with autism, language may serve as a bootstrap or compensatory mechanism for learning but cannot overcome an inherent weakness in concept formation that makes information processing challenging as task demands increase.
20多年前，明舒及其同事提出了自闭症的复杂信息处理模型，其中损伤的特征是一种涉及多种模式和认知领域的广泛性缺陷，这些模式和认知领域依赖于负责高阶能力的分布式皮层系统。随后的行为研究揭示了自闭症患者在概念形成和概念识别之间存在相关的分离，这表明缺乏一个潜在的组织结构来管理处理负荷的增加。最近一项研究的结果支持了这种概念推理方面的相对弱点对自闭症儿童和成人适应性功能的影响。在本研究中，我们进一步证明了相对有能力的大龄青少年和成年自闭症患者在概念推理方面存在困难，并证明这比他们在语言方面的差异更能体现出他们与年龄和能力匹配的典型发育对照组之间的差异。对于有语言能力的成年自闭症患者来说，语言可能作为一种引导或补偿机制来促进学习，但无法克服概念形成中固有的弱点，这种弱点使得随着任务要求的增加，信息处理变得具有挑战性。
