Analogical reasoning in subjects with autism, retardation, and normal development

The ability to integrate information is an important aspect of cognitive development. Piaget (1950) and others have seen an increase in this ability as marking important progress in cognitive development. Frith (1989), on the other hand proposed that this is an area of weakness for people with autism and suggested that such a deficit could provide an explanation for the characteristic symptoms of autism. As a test of the hypothesis that people with autism had difficulty in integrating information the performance of subjects with autism was compared with that of subjects with retardation and normally developing subjects, matched for verbal age and sex, on four analogy tasks. It was predicted that control subjects would perform significantly better than autistic subjects on these task. There was a complex pattern of results; however, it was apparent that there was a tendency for the autistic subjects to have greater difficulty with analogies tests than control subjects. It was suggested that autistic people have an impaired ability to integrate stimuli and thus have difficulty in perceiving relationships such as those depicted in analogy task.