Visual discrimination learning with variable irrelevant cues in autistic children.

Ten autistic children and 10 normal nursery school children, matched for mean developmental age of 4 years 9 months, were presented with figure stimuli that had variable irrelevant cues in two-choice simultaneous discrimination learning. The first condition was a control condition in which an irrelevant cue was held constant throughout the experiment. The second condition had an irrelevant cue varied between trials. The third condition varied irrelevant cues both within and between trials. The autistic group showed roughly equivalent performances in the three conditions except that the performance tended to be higher in the second than in the third condition. The normal group, on the other hand, showed the best performance in the first control condition and the poorest performance in the third condition. In the present experiment, the performance of the autistic group did not vary as a function of irrelevant variability. It was suggested that this result was due to the poor performance of the first control condition and was discussed in terms of ability of stimulus compounding of autistic children.