The findings did not support the widely reported generalisation ' difficulties ' associated with autism .
Research ers have generally considered autistic individuals to have difficulties generalising learned skills across novel context s. Successful generalisation is necessary for an intervention to have benefits in everyday life beyond the original learning environment .
We conducted a systematic review of r and omised controlled trials of early social communication interventions for children with autism in order to explore generalisation and its measurement .
Intact Prototype Formation but Impaired Generalization in Autism.
Cognitive processing in autism has been characterized by a difficulty with the abstract ion of information across multiple stimuli or situations and subsequent generalization to new stimuli or situations . This apparent difficulty leads to the suggestion that prototype formation , a process of creating a mental summary representation of multiple experienced stimuli that go together in a category , may be impaired in autism . Adults with high functioning autism and a typically developing comparison group matched on age and IQ completed a r and om dot pattern categorization task .  Participants with autism demonstrated intact prototype formation in all four ways it was operationally defined , and this performance was not significantly different from that of control participants . However , participants with autism  categorized dot patterns that were more highly distorted from the category prototypes less accurately than did control participants . These findings suggest , at least within the constraints of the r and om dot pattern task , that although prototype formation may not be impaired in autism , difficulties may exist with the generalization of what has been learned about a category to novel stimuli , particularly as they become less similar to the category 's prototype
The findings did not support the widely reported generalisation ' difficulties ' associated with autism .
Research ers have generally considered autistic individuals to have difficulties generalising learned skills across novel context s. Successful generalisation is necessary for an intervention to have benefits in everyday life beyond the original learning environment .
We conducted a systematic review of r and omised controlled trials of early social communication interventions for children with autism in order to explore generalisation and its measurement .