Abstract
Previous research has demonstrated abnormal trust and deception behaviors in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), and we aimed to examine whether these abnormalities were primarily due to their specific deficits in social learning. We tested 42 high-functioning children with ASD and 38 age- and ability-matched typically developing (TD) children in trust and deception tasks and a novel condition with reduced social components. Results indicated that while TD children improved their performance with more social components, children with ASD lacked this additional performance gain, though they performed similarly as TD children in the condition with reduced social components. Our findings highlight that deficits of ASD in trust and deception are primarily associated with failure of use of social cues.
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Notes
The AQ was translated by R.W.S. Chan, W.S. Liu, K.K. Chung, C.S. Sheh & E.K.F. Woo (2008), Hong Kong Working Group on ASD, cprc@hkusua.hku.hk.
The SRS is the Chinese version translated from the Constantino and Gruber (2002) version.
The SCQ is the Chinese version translated from Rutter et al. (2003) Copyright© 2003 by Western Psychological Services (Fourth Printing, April 2012).
Specifically, the overall distrust performance was correlated with the IQ and PPVT scores, p’s < 0.05; the overall deception performance was correlated with the PPVT score, p < 0.01.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31571135, 31371020, 61533001, and 31622029), and the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (863 Program, 2012AA011602). The authors are thankful to Dr. Lisa Joseph, Tianbi Li, Pengli, Li, Dr. Xueqin Wang, Qiandong Wang, Shuyuan Feng, Yinan Lv, and staff in Qingdao Elim School for their generous assistance in the project.
Author Contributions
YY was responsible for data collection, data analysis, and manuscript preparation; YT was responsible for data analysis; JF was responsible for data collection; HL was responsible for data analysis and paper revision; KW was responsible for study design and manuscript preparation; LY was responsible for study design, data analysis, and manuscript preparation. All authors read and approved the manuscript.
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All procedures performed in this study were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Informed consent was obtained from all children included in the study and their parents.
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Yang, Y., Tian, Y., Fang, J. et al. Trust and Deception in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Social Learning Perspective. J Autism Dev Disord 47, 615–625 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-016-2983-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-016-2983-2