Abstract
In light of the known visuoperceptual strengths and altered language skills in autism, we investigated the impact of problem content (semantic/visuospatial) combined with complexity and presence of lures on fluid reasoning in 43 autistic and 41 typical children (6–13 years old). Increased complexity and presence of lures diminished performance, but less so as the children’s age increased. Typical children were slightly more accurate overall, whereas autistic children were faster at solving complex visuospatial problems. Thus, reasoning could rely more extensively on visuospatial strategies in autistic versus typical children. A combined speed-accuracy measure revealed similar performance in both groups, suggesting a similar pace in fluid reasoning development. Visual presentation of conceptual information seems to suit the reasoning processes of autistic children.
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Acknowledgments
This research was funded by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Santé (FRQS) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). We wish to express our sincerest thanks to Hugues Leduc for his help with statistical analyses, Rebecca Cernik for her help with linguistic revision and Valérie Courchesne for her intellectual contribution to this project.
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Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) project #149036 to Isabelle Soulières; CIHR #PJT178310 to Isabelle Soulières
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ÉD and IS contributed to study conception and design. ÉD was responsible for material preparation, data collection, data analysis and the first draft of the manuscript. JDP and A-MN worked on data collection and helped with data analysis. All authors contributed to data interpretation and commented on previous versions of the manuscript. They all read and approved the final version.
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Danis, E., Nader, AM., Degré-Pelletier, J. et al. Semantic and Visuospatial Fluid Reasoning in School-Aged Autistic Children. J Autism Dev Disord 53, 4719–4730 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-022-05746-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-022-05746-1