We previously proposed a dissociation between intact concept identification and impaired concept formation in conceptual reasoning abilities in individuals with high functioning autism (HFA). Thus, they were found to do relatively well on sorting tests when the task was that of identifying a predetermined concept, but poorly on tasks such as the 20 Questions Test that required self-initiated concepts or full understanding of concepts as demonstrated by flexible use in changing circumstances. The present research extends this work to the area of verbal analogical reasoning in which the task is to identify analogical relationships among word pairs, such as part-whole or causal relationships (e.g., “handle is to cup as branch is to…tree, picture, house or desk” or “fire is to heat as poverty is to…hunger, beauty, color, or joy). The analogies test is a concept identification procedure because there are predetermined correct answers for the series of multiple-choice items.
Objectives:
The purpose of the current study was to determine if individuals with HFA would do as well as normal controls at verbal analogical reasoning but more poorly than controls on the concept formation tasks.
Methods:
30 individuals with HFA and 16 demographically and IQ comparable typically-developing individuals were administered a written analogies test evaluating analogies that had synonymous, opposite, functional, characteristic property, causality, sequential, and part-whole relationships. They also received the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) and the 20 Questions task which required self-initiating of concepts in an effort to identify a target object. t-test comparisons were made to evaluate group differences. We hypothesized that individuals with HFA would do as well as controls on the analogies test but significantly more poorly on the WCST and 20 Questions tests.
Results:
There were no significant (p<0.5) differences between the autism and control groups for any of the analogies categories. There were significant differences for constraint-seeking and hypothesis testing questions from the 20 Questions Test and for the perseverative errors score from the WCST. Constraint-seeking questions are those that narrow the range of possible correct identifications (e.g., “Is it an animal?” or “Is it a vegetable?”), while hypothesis testing is essentially random guessing (e.g., “Is it a glove?”).
Conclusions: The findings provide further support for the concept of a dissociation between intact concept identification and impaired concept formation abilities in individuals with HFA. This distinction appears to hold even in the case of abstract cognitive processes involved in analogical reasoning.