Autism, ContextNoncontext Information Processing, and Atypical Development

Abstract EN

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.