N400 in participants with high function autism and controls

Equivalence class formation is demonstrated to be reflected in the electrophysiological (EEG) component N400. The N400 component is an event-related-potential observed 400 ms after presentation of unrelated stimulus pair in comparison with a related stimulus pair. Inconsistent results are found in participants with autism, some experiments have demonstrated the N400 effect and some not. In the current experiment, one group with high functioning autism were trained 6 conditional discriminations with C-stimuli as meaningful stimuli and A and B stimuli were abstract shapes. The training was followed by testing for emergent relations. Then, the participants conducted a priming procedure with unrelated stimulus pairs and stimulus pairs related by the features of symmetry and transitivity/equivalence. The results from the experiment showed an observable N400 response, but with differences in the different features of an equivalence class.