Summary: People with stronger autistic traits exhibit distinct and highly effective exploration patterns, according to a new study. These individuals tend to persist longer in curiosity-driven tasks, leading to better overall performance. In the study, participants with higher autistic traits explored consistently, even when faced with challenging learning environments, while those with lower traits engaged more briefly.
This prolonged exploration allowed the higher-trait participants to achieve better learning outcomes. Researchers suggest these findings could inspire tailored educational approaches. The study emphasizes that individuals with autistic traits bring valuable and unique strategies to learning and exploration.
Key Facts:
- Higher autistic traits were linked to greater persistence in exploration.
- Participants with higher autistic traits performed better in challenging learning tasks.
- Findings suggest unique exploration strategies could guide personalized learning.
Source: PLOS
People with stronger autistic trails showed distinct exploration patterns and higher levels of persistence in a computer game, ultimately resulting in better performance than people with lower scores of autistic traits, according to a new study published this week in PLOS Computational Biology by Francesco Poli of Radboud Universiteit, the Netherlands, and colleagues.
Scientists know that individuals display curiosity and explore their environments to learn. How a person selects what they want to explore plays a pivotal role in how they learn and research has shown that exploration levels are highly variable across individuals.
In the new study, researchers tested 77 university students in a curiosity-driven exploration task in which participants had to learn the hiding patterns of multiple characters to predict where they would be.
Levels of autistic traits were separately gauged using both self-reported and parent-reported social behavioral questionnaires.
People with lower scores of general autistic traits were less persistent and sought learning opportunities by engaging with characters more in the early stages of exploration.
People with higher scores of autistic traits were more persistent and explored for longer times, even when learning was not easy. On this task, this meant that they performed better.
“This research underscores the importance of recognizing that individuals, especially those with autistic traits, may possess unique strategies for exploration and learning. This realization can guide educators and policy-makers in crafting more tailored learning environments,” the authors say.
Poli adds: “People explore their environment in different ways. When they are free to explore as they want, individuals with higher autistic traits in our study showed a strong motivation to learn, persisted longer, and often performed better.”
Funding: This study was supported by a Donders Centre for Cognition internal grant to S.H. and R.B.M. (“Here’s looking at you, kid.” A model-based approach to interindividual differences in infants’ looking behavior and their relationship with cognitive performance and IQ; award/start date: 15 March 2018), a VICI grant from the Netherland Organization for Scientific Research NWO to S.H. (“Loving to learn – How curiosity drives cognitive development in young children”; serial number: VI.C.191.022), a Wellcome Trust center grant to benefit of R.B.M. (“Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging”; serial number: 203139/Z/16/Z), a EPA Cephalosporin Fund and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council to R.B.M. (BB/N019814/1).
About this Autism and learning research news
Author: Charlotte Bhaskar
Source: PLOS
Contact: Charlotte Bhaskar – PLOS
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“Autistic traits foster effective curiosity-driven exploration” by Francesco Poli et al. PLOS Computational Biology
Abstract
Autistic traits foster effective curiosity-driven exploration
Curiosity-driven exploration involves actively engaging with the environment to learn from it. Here, we hypothesize that the cognitive mechanisms underlying exploratory behavior may differ across individuals depending on personal characteristics such as autistic traits. In turn, this variability might influence successful exploration.
To investigate this, we collected self- and other-reports of autistic traits from university students, and tested them in an exploration task in which participants could learn the hiding patterns of multiple characters.
Participants’ prediction errors and learning progress (i.e., the decrease in prediction error) on the task were tracked with a hierarchical delta-rule model. Crucially, participants could freely decide when to disengage from a character and what to explore next.
We examined whether autistic traits modulated the relation of prediction errors and learning progress with exploration. We found that participants with lower scores on other-reports of insistence-on-sameness and general autistic traits were less persistent, primarily relying on learning progress during the initial stages of exploration.
Conversely, participants with higher scores were more persistent and relied on learning progress in later phases of exploration, resulting in better performance in the task.
This research advances our understanding of the interplay between autistic traits and exploration drives, emphasizing the importance of individual traits in learning processes and highlighting the need for personalized learning approaches.
