Reasoning and discourse coherence in Autism Spectrum Disorder

This chapter shows that people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) differ from neurotypicals in some of the logical inferences that they endorse or reject and explains that this fact is a fundamental feature of autistic cognition, rooted in homologies between language and motor planning, particularly action-goals and the synthesis of action sequences. A reconceptualization of the false-belief task as including a suppression task for modus ponens suggests that people with ASD will suppress modus ponens much less than neurotypical controls. This conjecture receives further support from an experiment designed to test the executive dysfunction theory of autism. There are several reasons why inhibition is compromised in ASD e.g., immature inhibitory interneurons, and a pruning process which selectively spares excitatory neurons. For neurotypicals the rate of endorsement drops from 67.1% to 35.7%, and for subjects with ASD there was a drop from 45% to 28%. After conditionalization that difference is not significant.