Autism, Context/Noncontext Information Processing, and Atypical Development
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...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Hindawi Limited
2011-01-01
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| Series: | Autism Research and Treatment |
| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2011/681627 |
| Summary: | 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. |
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| ISSN: | 2090-1925 2090-1933 |