Abstract
Recent studies have shown that in some reasoning tasks people with Autism Spectrum Disorder perform better than typically developing people. The present note gives a brief comparison of two such tasks, namely a syllogistic task and a decision-making task, identifying the 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. We also make some general remarks on our approach.
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Notes
- 1.
Autism Spectrum Disorder is a psychiatric disorder with the following diagnostic criteria: 1. Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction. 2. Restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities. For details, see Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-V), published by the American Psychiatric Association.
- 2.
In particular, in [4] it is demonstrated that two seemingly dissimilar reasoning tasks, namely two different versions of a false-belief task called the Smarties task, have exactly the same underlying logical structure. Similarly, in [5] it is demonstrated that four second-order false-belief tasks share a certain logical structure, but they are also distinct in a systematic way. We remark that such a strategy was also pursued in the book [17], where it was shown that a false-belief task and what is called the box task have a logical structure similar to a third task called the suppression task.
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Braüner, T., Ghosh, A., Ghosh, S. (2021). Understanding Responses of Individuals with ASD in Syllogistic and Decision-Making Tasks: A Formal Study. In: Cleophas, L., Massink, M. (eds) Software Engineering and Formal Methods. SEFM 2020 Collocated Workshops. SEFM 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12524. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67220-1_10
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