Implicit Global-Local Learning in Young People With and Without Autism

Implicit (unconscious) learning ostensibly affects cognitive and social skills in both typical and atypical populations, such as those on the autism spectrum. Research into implicit learning in autism has yielded conflicting results, underscoring the need to explore factors that might influence their implicit learning. One such factor is processing style, specifically processing biases for either global (holistic) or local (detail-oriented) processing. In our experiment, we investigated the potential role of processing differences in implicit (and explicit) learning performance in individuals with autism (n = 20) and typically developing (TD) individuals (n = 22), by using a global-local version of the artificial grammar learning (AGL) task. Overall AGL performance and explicit knowledge yielded only a trend toward an interaction suggesting a greater global processing advantage in TD participants compared with that in participants with autism but no conclusive evidence. The above interaction was further observed in terms of implicit knowledge, with TD participants demonstrating higher levels of implicit structural knowledge than individuals with autism during global processing. Implicit knowledge between group differences during local processing remains weak/inconclusive. Overall, our findings suggest interesting potential processing differences in the implicit learning between individuals with and without autism.