New behaviors or skills that people with autism spectrum disorders are sometimes able to acquire in a particular setting can be difficult to transfer and apply to similar but different situations. For example, children with autism are able to be taught what a dog is by showing them pictures of dogs and repeating the single word ” dog” over and over again. But when they were then taught what a cat was, or when they were shown another dog, they didn’t quite understand how it related to the previous situation and had to go back and learn it again from the beginning. A new study recently showed that the way autistic people are trained to acquire new knowledge through repetition actually hinders their ability to apply what they learn to other situations. The finding challenges the popular educational approach that emphasizes repetitive practice for people with autism. ” Some systematic findings have been made about the underlying mechanisms by which people with autism learn knowledge, and the potential causes of their restricted, abnormal learning styles,” said Carnegie? said Marlene Behrmann, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Mellon University. ” This research is beginning to dig shallowly into the truth.” Participants with high-functioning autism and controls were trained to look on a computer screen to find the location of three diagonal lines surrounded by horizontal lines. Both groups were asked to find the diagonal lines separately over an eight-day practice period and were tested on their speed and accuracy. The diagonal lines were kept in the same location for the first four days, but moved to another location on the screen on days five through eight. ” Setting up the experiment in this way was crucial to allow us to make initial observations about how people with autism learn in a simple, stationary task and to document the difficulty of applying knowledge as the experiment progressed,” said Dov Sagi of the Weizmann Institute of Science. Because the diagonal lines were placed in the first position for the first four days, learning was the same for the autism group and the control group. However, once the position of the diagonal line changed, the essential differences became apparent. The control group made a smooth transition and found a new position, and their performance continued to improve. In contrast, when the target position was changed, the autistic individuals performed poorly and they were unable to improve their performance, indicating that they did not benefit from the initial learning of the first position. More interestingly, they consistently failed to find the second position as successfully as they found the first position, showing that the hampered learning reflects the consequences of excessive repetition. ” It’s as if they exhibited ‘ overspecialization’ of learning, and their learning became solidified and rigid because learning in the first situation adversely affected their ability to learn in the other,” the paper from the Weizmann Institute said lead author Hila Harris. Next, the researchers set out to find ways to avoid overspecificity. This time it was a new group of adults with autism and a control group who performed the exact same experiment, but this time interspersed with occasional “dummy” screens that didn’t contain any diagonal lines. This time, when the position of the lines changed on the fifth day, the autistic group also quickly found a new position. “We conclude that interrupting repetition allows the visual system to rest for a period of time and that it improves learning efficiency and generalization of acquired skills in people with autism,” said David Heeger, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at New York University. ” Sensory adaptation resulting from repetitive stimulation hinders learning and cements learning in certain specific situations. Learning is more efficient without sensory adaptation and is more likely to generalize. ” The team believes the study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, has significant implications for educating people with autism. ” Teaching people with autism needs to be done in a way that supports or promotes generalization, rather than in a way that reinforces specialization, ” said Nancy Minshew, a professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Pittsburgh. ” For example, when learning the concept of dogs, using examples of a variety of dogs , and even more animals, includes variability from the beginning and motivates to learn a broad concept rather than using a particular example.”