Marinelli Chiara Valeria, Nardacchione Giuliana, Martelli Marialuisa, Tommasi Vincenza, Turi Marco, Angelelli Paola, Limone Pierpaolo, Zoccolotti Pierluigi
Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, Department of Humanities, Letters, Cultural Heritage and Educational Studies, Foggia University, Foggia, Italy.
Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2025 Jun 10;19:1560362. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2025.1560362. eCollection 2025.
The "" suggests that automaticity relies on acquiring specific instances that enhance performance, preventing the slower application of procedures. It has been proposed that a low ability in instance acquisition may be the key cause of the comorbidity among learning disorders. We investigated performance on a learning task to test the hypothesis that difficulties in acquiring and consolidating instances would be linked with comorbid learning disorders.
We examined the individual rate of learning of 143 young adults with typical development (32M, 111F, mean age: 20.3) and 59 with specific learning disorders (SLD; 12M and 47F, mean age: 20.9).
Both groups significantly reduced their response times across learning trials (following a power trend) without generalization to untrained items, indicating that learning occurred through instance acquisition. Initially, participants with SLD performed worse than the controls. However, they reduced their times by about 96 sec with practice, even though their "endpoint" (asymptote) remained slower than controls. Group differences were related to these two scaling values, not the power curve coefficient. Subsequently, we reclassified the sample into three groups based on the type of deficit: one without procedural/instance deficits ("Control" group), one with selective deficits in "procedural" tasks ("Poor procedural" group), and one with deficits in instance-based tasks ("Poor instance" group). The poor instance group not only showed deficits across all tasks requiring instance retrieval (i.e., arithmetical facts and lexical representation retrieval) but was also slower (86 s) in the learning task compared to the other groups (58 and 70 s, respectively; at least < 0.01). The "Poor procedural" group behaved similarly to the "Control" group.
Results support with the notion that a low ability to acquire and consolidate instances may contribute to the comorbidity of learning disorders.
“ ”表明自动化依赖于获取特定实例来提高表现，避免程序应用速度变慢。有人提出，实例获取能力低可能是学习障碍共病的关键原因。我们研究了一项学习任务的表现，以检验获取和巩固实例方面的困难与共病学习障碍有关这一假设。
我们考察了143名发育正常的年轻人（32名男性，111名女性，平均年龄：20.3岁）和59名患有特定学习障碍（SLD；12名男性和47名女性，平均年龄：20.9岁）的个体学习率。
两组在学习试验中均显著缩短了反应时间（呈幂函数趋势），且未泛化到未训练项目，这表明学习是通过实例获取实现的。最初，患有特定学习障碍的参与者表现比对照组差。然而，通过练习他们的时间减少了约96秒，尽管他们的“终点”（渐近线）仍比对照组慢。组间差异与这两个标度值有关，而非幂曲线系数。随后，我们根据缺陷类型将样本重新分为三组：一组无程序/实例缺陷（“对照组”），一组在“程序”任务中有选择性缺陷（“程序差”组），一组在基于实例的任务中有缺陷（“实例差”组）。实例差组不仅在所有需要实例检索的任务（即算术事实和词汇表征检索）中表现出缺陷，而且在学习任务中比其他组慢（86秒）（其他组分别为58秒和70秒；至少 < 0.01）。“程序差”组的表现与“对照组”相似。
结果支持这样一种观点，即获取和巩固实例的能力低可能导致学习障碍的共病。
