Thought this was interesting...

Overcoming some prior limitations of earlier studies, I conducted a study with a team of researchers led by Jamie Brown at the Laboratory for Research into Autism at the University of Cambridge [read full article in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology here].

We compared the performance of 26 children with high-functioning autism spectrum condition to 26 typically developing children on four implicit learning tasks, each one designed to tap into a different domain of implicit learning. We even administered a measure of implicit social learning which researchers have assumed would show an impairment in people with autism. We minimized reliance on explicit strategies. We matched the two groups on IQ. We administered a measure of explicit learning for comparison purposes and we administered a reliable index of autistic symptomatology that relates to real-world implicit learning performance [Read "Can People with Autism Learn Implicitly?" for a more detailed summary of the methods and results of our study.]