Understanding responses of people with ASD in diverse reasoning tasks: A formal study

TL;DR

This study explores how people with Autism Spectrum Disorder perform better in certain reasoning tasks compared to others.

Contribution

The paper identifies commonalities and differences in reasoning tasks among individuals with ASD using Marr's cognitive framework.

Findings

ASD individuals show better performance in specific reasoning tasks.

Tasks share computational-level commonalities but differ at the algorithmic level.

Contextual stimuli significantly influence reasoning outcomes in ASD individuals.

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that in some reasoning tasks people with Autism Spectrum Disorder perform better than typically developing people. This paper compares four such tasks, namely a syllogistic task, two decision-making tasks, and a task from the heuristics and biases literature, the aim being to identify common structure as well as differences. In the terminology of David Marr’s three levels of cognitive systems, the tasks show commonalities on the computational level in terms of the effect of contextual stimuli, though an in-depth analysis of such contexts provides certain distinguishing features in the algorithmic level. We also make some general remarks on our approach, so as to set the stage for further studies in the area which could provide a better understanding of the reasoning process of ASD individuals.

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