Is Learning by Observation Impaired in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder?

Background:  

New competencies may be learned through active experience and observation of others’ experiences. Observing another person performing a complex action accelerates the observer’s acquisition of the same action, multiplies learning opportunities, limits the time-consuming process of learning by trial and error and reduces the practice needed to learn the skill. Therefore, learning by observation is an accelerator of learning which belongs to the same category of processes involved in recognizing, planning and executing actions. Thus, the mechanisms involved in observational learning are retained to be similar to those involved in experienced learning and influence each other. Observational learning does not just involve copying an action but it also requires that the observer transforms the observation into an action as similar as possible to that of the actor in terms of both the goal to be reached and the motor strategies to be applied. Actually, observing others’ action involves generation of an image of oneself performing the same action. In other words,  imitators can use third-person information to create first-person knowledge. Observational learning requires the coordination of complex cognitive functions such as action representation, attention, effort and motivation and at same time understanding others’ gestures, reading their minds and emotions and making inferences about their behaviors. Given that individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show atypical patterns of visual attention when observing social stimuli, we investigated whether differences in visual attention when observing an action to be imitated may affect learning by observation in patients with autism.

Objectives:

We designed the present research to study the features of learning by seeing and learning by doing in individuals with ASD. In particular, the following questions were addressed: Can individuals with autism learn novel actions via observation? Do they gain an understanding of action-effect relations? Though observational learning is a main focus of education and training, there are only few experimental research studies investigating these issues in children with autism.

Methods:  

For this purpose, the performance of a group of individuals with ASD (mean age 10 years and 3 months, 10;03 SEM ± 0;08) was compared with that of an age- and gender-matched group of typically developing (TD) individuals on a task that involved learning a visuo-motor sequence of “correct” items. The participants learned the sequence either by performing the task after observing an actor detect the sequence (observational training) or by actually performing the task by trial and error.

Results:  

Results demonstrate that ASD participants were able to learn a sequence by observation and became as efficient as TD participants in detecting a sequence by trial and error after a task of lerning by observation. Moreover, regardless of the learning modalities, ASD individuals exhibited a higher number of perseverative errors and longer times in comparison to TD participants.

Conclusions:  

Our results demonstrate that in individuals with ASD the ability to learn by observation is not impaired. The present results have important implications for developing interventions to stimulate and improve learning in ASD children.