The Capacity for Implicit Social Learning in Relation to Autistic Traits

People learn social cue-outcome relationships and use this knowledge to guide their behavior, even in the absence of explicit knowledge of social contingencies. The aim of the current study was to investigate variations in implicit social learning abilities between typically developed individuals with low and high number of autistic traits, as assessed by the AQ questionnaire. In the learning phase, participants repeatedly observed two different identities whose gaze direction and facial expression were manipulated to convey either a proor anti-social disposition toward the observer. These dispositions were determined by specific contingencies between these cues. Crucially, the participants were not aware of these contingencies (as confirmed in the debrief session). In the test phase, the participants showed specific biases in their perceptual report of morphs of the two identities, which reflected that they had implicitly learned the identities’ dispositions. The results indicated that in the current paradigm others’ dispositions can be learned implicitly (i.e. without awareness of the cue contingencies), and that this ability is correlated with AQ scores; participants with higher AQ scores showed less implicit social learning than those with lower AQ scores.