Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, United States; Department of Psychology, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, United States
Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, United States; Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, Newark, United States
Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, United States; Department of Neurology & Neurological Sciences, Stanford Neurosciences Institute, Stanford, United States; Stanford Neurosciences Institute, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, United States
Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) often display atypical learning styles; however, little is known regarding learning-related brain plasticity and its relation to clinical phenotypic features. Here, we investigate cognitive learning and neural plasticity using functional brain imaging and a novel numerical problem-solving training protocol. Children with ASD showed comparable learning relative to typically developing children but were less likely to shift from rule-based to memory-based strategy. While learning gains in typically developing children were associated with greater plasticity of neural representations in the medial temporal lobe and intraparietal sulcus, learning in children with ASD was associated with more stable neural representations. Crucially, the relation between learning and plasticity of neural representations was moderated by insistence on sameness, a core phenotypic feature of ASD. Our study uncovers atypical cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying learning in children with ASD, and informs pedagogical strategies for nurturing cognitive abilities in childhood autism.
