Spatial and identity cues differentially affect implicit learning in Chinese autistic children in the contextual cueing task with human stimuli

Background: Autistic children cannot adjust their behaviors in response to environmental social cues as readily as typically developing children. The development of adaptive social behaviors is mainly dependent on the ability to implicitly learn associations or probabilities that are embedded in the environmental cues. Mounting evidence has suggested that autistic individuals have intact implicit learning in contextual cueing (CC) tasks with simple arrays of letters or numbers. However, it remains unclear whether autistic individuals have intact implicit learning in CC tasks with human stimuli. Spatial cues and stimulus-identity cues in CC tasks are thought to rely on distinct neural networks. It is also unknown whether these different types of cues will have different effects on implicit learning in autistic children if human photographs are used in CC tasks. This study examined the implicit learning performance of autistic children under different cue conditions in CC tasks that used photographs of children. Results: Autistic children showed similar implicit learning performance to the comparison group, using only stimulus-identity cues. When both stimulus-identity and spatial cues were provided, implicit contextual learning was only observed in the comparison children, but not in the autistic group. Conclusions: The results suggest that spatial cues and stimulus-identity cues have different effects on the implicit learning performance of autistic children. The atypical performance of autistic children on implicit learning when spatial cues combined with identity cues may result in divergent social behaviors and serve as an intrinsic mechanistic contributor to social interaction differences associated with autism.