Speaker: Torben Braüner (Roskilde University)
Date and Time: Thursday, February 17th 2022, 16:30-18:00, Amsterdam time.
Venue: online.
Title: Understanding responses of people with ASD in diverse reasoning tasks: A formal study
Abstract.
Recent studies have shown that in some reasoning tasks people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) perform better than typically developing people. In this talk, I compare three such tasks, namely a syllogistic task, a decision-making task from behavioral economics, and a task from the heuristics and biases literature (the Linda task), the aim being to identify common structure as well as differences.
In the terminology of David Marr’s three levels of cognitive systems, the tasks show commonalities on the computational level in terms of the effect of contextual stimuli, though an in-depth analysis of such contexts provides certain distinguishing features in the algorithmic level. I also make some general remarks on the approach, so as to set the stage for further studies in the area which could provide a better understanding of the reasoning process of ASD individuals.
Joint work with Aishwarya Ghosh (University of Utah, USA) and Sujata Ghosh (Indian Statistical Institute, Chennai, India).