The Effect Of Acquired Knowledge On Perceptual Processing In Autistic Individuals

Autism Spectrum Disorder(ASD)is a developmental disorder,characterized by stereotyped behavior and social disorder(American Psychiatric Association,2013).Patients with ASD often have defects in sensory processing,especially in the perception of social stimuli.The autistic trait is a cognitive and behavioral pattern similar to that of ASD patients but has not yet reached the diagnostic criteria.It has a continuous normal distribution in the normal population.Some researchers have proposed that the acquired social knowledge can make up for the shortcomings of ASD patients and those with high autistic traits in perceptual processing.Therefore,researchers still have controversy about whether ASD patients can learn social knowledge and use it to make up for the defects of perceptual processing.At present,the research on whether acquired knowledge can compensate the social perception of people with autistic traits is very limited.Therefore,this article focuses on this issue and considers whether acquired knowledge can compensate the social perception of people with autistic traits or not,expecting it to provide preliminary evidence if it is possible.There are two experiments in this study.Experiment 1 and Experiment 2explores whether the learning of explicit and implicit social knowledge can affect the face perception processing of people with autistic traits respectively.The procedures of the two experiments are the same,and each experiment includes three stages: the social knowledge learning stage,the acquired knowledge test stage,and the experimental stage to break through continuous flicker suppression.Both experiments adopted the breaking continuous flash suppression(b-CFS)paradigm,and the dependent variables index were reaction time and processing consumption index.The difference is that in Experiment 1and Experiment 2,what the subjects need to learn is a kind of explicit and implicit social knowledge respectively.The results of Experiment 1 show that the acquired explicit social knowledge does not affect the perceptual processing of people with low autism traits,but it can affect the perceptual processing of people with high autism traits,making it more difficult for them to look directly at faces.The results of Experiment 2 show that the acquired implicit social knowledge cannot affect the perceptual processing of people with low autism traits,but it can affect the perceptual processing of people with high autism traits,and the direction of influence is opposite to that of explicit social knowledge,leading to it more difficult to avoid faces.The results of this study can deepen our understanding of the impact of autistic traits on social interaction mechanisms,provide evidence to support high autistic traits that may have similar perceptual processing defects to ASD patients,and provide new ideas for interventions for ASD patients.