Barbara A. Church - US grants

Metacognition (knowing one's own mental states), and declarative cognition (expressing them) are essential cognitive functions and focuses of research. The proposed research will extend these research areas. It will give participants (human adults, children, nonhuman animals) a behavioral-report methodology by which they can describe their own task approach. It will give researchers a nonverbal way to instruct participants in the correct task approach. It will explore a new aspect of metacognition?the self-awareness of one's own task strategy. It will explore the roots of declarative cognition in young children, by providing a behavioral channel for self- report before the verbal channel fully supports that declaration. It will be transformative in comparative psychology, providing behavioral self-reports to animals for the first time. To this end, the proposed research asks whether participants can tune attention based on the instruction provided by abstract icons. It asks whether they can use those icons to make reports of their own task approach. It asks whether these icons can acquire quasi-symbolic properties, so that they are understood receptively (inducing instructional sets) and productively (allowing self-reports of task strategies). It addresses those questions using matching, categorization, same-different, and other influential tasks from comparative and developmental psychology. Finally, it asks whether participants can use their abstract icons to state their task preferences. Metacognition and declarative cognition are crucial to intellectual adaptation, educational success, and daily living. Understanding them well is an important scientific and mental-health goal. The proposed research will provide new ways to study the most basic forms of these capacities. It will provide animal models. These can be used in neuroscience studies to foster or rehabilitate these capacities. The research will give developmental researchers tools for exploring the beginnings of declarative cognition during child development. It will open nonverbal channels of declarative cognition that could serve humans impaired at verbal communication. These could support human comfort and palliative care. It will open a new metacognitive channel by which comparative psychologists may understand better animals' self-reflective minds.

Project Summary Individuals suffering from Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) show accelerated learning in some perceptual tasks, but deficits in perceptual learning and the ability to generalize learning to novel situations. Perceptual deficits likely reflect abnormalities in cortical structure and function in individuals with ASD, and they may underlie (or exacerbate) many of the social and communicative deficits that define ASD. In particular, the abilities to perceptually categorize facial expressions, speech sounds, prosody, and gestural movements that children acquire during development are a prerequisite for normal language and social skills to emerge. Therefore, understanding the perceptual learning deficits associated with ASD may help us better understand and ameliorate communicative and social impairments. However, the research so far directly examining categorization and perceptual learning in ASD individuals has produced mixed findings and shows strong indications of important effects of individual differences. Recent simulations with connectionist models of visual cortical processing and pilot data comparing learning with and without feedback suggest a way to explain the diverse findings across studies and individuals. Specifically, these models and data suggest that deficits in basic neural plasticity mechanisms (experience dependent changes in cortical neural connections) particularly under conditions of learning from attentive exposure can account for atypical perceptual category learning shown by high functioning (HF) children and adults with ASD. There are two general aims of this project. They are designed to lay a solid foundation for future work that could fully develop neurally-grounded cognitive processing theories of ASD, and translational training protocols to help facilitate learning by children with ASD. The first is to explore perceptual learning when learning from exposure versus learning with feedback and to determine whether abnormalities found when learning complex visual perceptual categories also extend to perceptual learning of basic perceptual discriminations and to the auditory modality. The second aim is to examine whether progressive typicality ordering of stimuli affects learning in either or both learning conditions and whether that is true for all levels and modalities studied. Four experiments will be conducted using variants of a basic perceptual learning methodology comparing learning from exposure versus with direct training. Two experiments will use visual stimuli and two auditory. Two will look at family resemblance category learning and two will examine perceptual discrimination learning. These experiments will test the following hypotheses derived from past simulations and experiments: unlike typically developing children, (1) training regimens involving feedback will produce much greater learning than learning from exposure in HF children with ASD; (2) HF children with ASD will show an advantage of progressive ordering only with direct training; and (3) HF children with ASD will show abnormalities in perceptual learning from exposure in both perceptual category learning and discrimination tasks and in both the visual and auditory modalities.