Title: Quantitative analysis of perception ability in autism spectrum disorder

Authors: Tanu Wadhera; Deepti Kakkar; Joy Karan Singh; Nonita Sharma; Rajneesh Rani

Addresses: School of Electronics, Indian Institute of Information Technology Una (IIITU), Himachal Pradesh-177209, India ' Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar NIT, Jalandhar 144011, India ' Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar NIT, Jalandhar 144011, India ' Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar NIT, Jalandhar 144011, India ' Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar NIT, Jalandhar 144011, India

Abstract: The perception ability has attained much recognition in the identification of cognitive processing and decision-making in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) individuals. However, the prior studies have subjectively worked on perception ability using conditioning paradigms that can be intolerable for ASD individuals. The present paper quantitatively investigates the perception ability of ASD individuals by modelling visual judgement and statistical learning. Thirty ASD and typically developing (TD) individuals are selected for experimenting distinguishing animated images related to risk situations with different risk levels. The experimental paradigm-based behavioural measures (reaction time, d′ index, and accuracy) revealed that ASD individuals, although performed poorly than TDs, they visually and statistically perceived the risk. Quantitatively, the perception level in ASD is (mean 0.57 ± 0.02) in the range [0 1]. In comparison to TDs, the attenuated visual and statistical learning during the experiment could lead to impaired perception in ASD. However, when statistical learning comes into action (comparing performance in block 1 and block 6), it played a crucial role in improving visual knowledge; thus, the perception ability of ASD individuals. In the future, the studies can implicate the quantitative perception to identify other deficits in the ASD phenotype.

Keywords: autism; judgement; perception; quantitative; risk-sense; safety knowledge; statistical learning; visual understanding.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLC.2023.127716

International Journal of Learning and Change, 2023 Vol.15 No.1, pp.70 - 84

Received: 05 Sep 2020
Accepted: 21 Nov 2020
Published online: 15 Dec 2022 *