Correlação entre os resultados de avaliações neuropsicológicas e o desempenho em discriminação condicional com crianças com Transtorno do Espectro do Autismo
Abstract
Neuropsychology is a science that allows one to draw the profile of cognitive impairment and
skills preserved in order to design possible treatments and appropriate educational practices,
aiming for better quality of life of the individual. Among the cognitive abilities investigated
by neuropsychology, executive functions refers to a system that manages the cognitivebehavioral
resources, with the purpose of behavior planning and regulation. This study is a
correlational basic research aimed to verify whether the results found in neuropsychological
evaluations of executive functions in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are
predictive of or show any correlation with the performance of these children in conditional
discrimination via identity matching-to-sample (MTS) tasks. A battery of neuropsychological
tests were used to evaluate executive function to identify participants’ existing and missing
skills, with possible quantification and qualification of the results. The tests used were
Wisconsin, Test Tracks Pre-School, Corsi blocks and Attention Test for Cancellation. A
portable microcomputer and the Master computer program were used to present MTS tasks.
The participants were 13 children with ASD, aged 4 to 12 years, regularly enrolled in a
Special Institution / Regular Education School. The correlations revealed significant
associations between neuropsychological tests and MTS tasks performance. In general, it was
observed that the lower the performance in Test Wisconsin, more perseverative responses
were presented and higher correlation was found with the MTS tasks. It was also observed
that the better the performance in the Cancellation and trails tests, better performance on MTS
tasks. The attention and cognitive flexibility may be pre-requisites for better performances in
MTS tasks. Future research could further explore the MTS tasks for evaluation of cognitive
and attentional flexibility and intervention of individuals with ASD. Another possibility is to
check whether training with several exemplars of identity MTS would improve performance
on neuropsychological tests.