Pichon, C. , Kissine, M. & Destrebecqz, A.
Free University of Brussels
The card-sorting test is a well-known test of cognitive control. In this task, subjects have to classify cards according to one of two dimensions (i.e., either the color or the shape of the stimuli). Based on explicit instructions, children are unable to switch rules before the age of 4. Recently, Bremner et al. (2007) found that 2-years-old children acquire the ability to manipulate and inhibit mental representations when learning is implicit. These results suggest that inhibition seems to develop in early stages of life. Despite the proven difficulty of autistic children with executive functions (including inhibition), implicit learning remains largely unexplored in this population. Hence, in the present study, we trained children with a deterministic sequence of six elements. We compared the ability of normal and autistic children to learn flexibly and to reproduce a visual sequence (inclusion condition) or to produce a different sequence (exclusion condition). Our results show that children with autism are able to learn a visual sequence and also to inhibit the production of the first sequence. These results are discussed regarding the potential importance of implicit learning for cognitive control in autism.