Why Is Categorization So Difficult for Children and Youth with ASD?

Categorization can be very confusing to people with ASD. To many, it is a totally foreign, perplexing concept. Why is that?

Different Ways of Thinking

As a woman with very high-functioning autism, Temple Grandin says that she thinks "in pictures" whereas most typical people think in words. Words help people categorize. In Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from my Life with Autism, Temple Grandin describes the way she thinks of dogs.

... my concept of dogs is ... linked to every dog I’ve ever known. It’s as if I have a card catalog of dogs I have seen, complete with pictures, which continually grows as I add more examples to my video library. If I think about Great Danes, the first memory that pops into my head is Dansk, the Great Dane owned by the headmaster at my high school. The next Great Dane I visualize is Helga, who was Dansk’s replacement. The next is my aunt’s dog in Arizona, and my final image comes from an advertisement for Fitwell seat covers that featured that kind of dog. My memories usually appear in my imagination in strict chronological order, and the images I visualize are always specific. There is no generic, generalized Great Dane. (Grandin, 1995 p.#??)

Could you imagine how challenging it would be for most of us to have to go through a visual list in your mind when someone simply mentions the word "dog?"

Paying Attention

There are several things about paying attention that most of us take for granted. Even in infancy, most babies quickly learn to look at and listen to things that are (a) meaningful and important, (b) interesting and exciting, and (c) comforting and make them feel good. Typically developing babies learn to focus on people around them and on things that are happening in their environment. They learn to tune in to certain tones of voices and recognize their own names when they hear them. These babies react socially by looking at and listening to people and things, smiling, crying, laughing, cooing, moving or reaching toward something they find interesting and desirable. Even babies who are deaf, blind or in some way physically challenged pay attention to and interact with their surrounding world in a variety of ways.

By comparison, many children with ASD pay attention to things that most of us would find to be unimportant. A piece of string or the corner of a wall may interest a child with ASD for an hour. A spinning wheel on a toy car may be far more fascinating than actually making the car go or joining in an activity in which others are playing with cars. When two or more people are able to show a mutual interest in something or somebody it is called joint attention. Joint attention also involves shifting attention from each other to an object or activity, and back again to each other. People with ASD often have great difficulty with joint attention, and frequently get "stuck" on the object or activity holding their attention.

Jamal, a preschool student with ASD, is seated at a table with two classmates for a silverware sorting game. Even though his teacher has explained the activity and his classmates have taken their turns to put their silverware in the proper section of the silverware tray, Jamal is focused on counting the tines of the forks. He has not paid attention to the others and he is "stuck" on what he is doing.

Jamal’s tendency to focus on less relevant features, like the tines of the forks instead of the actual activity, is known as overselectivity (Lovaas, Koegel, & Schreibman, 1979).

Joyce is very focused on colors. She groups and sequences objects by color at every opportunity. For example, she eats colored cereal such as Fruit Loops in sequence by the colors of the rainbow. She eats all of the red, then orange, then yellow and so on!

While Joyce’s cereal eating can be a fun game, such instances of overselective attention can greatly interfere with other tasks involving categorization.

Abstract Concepts

Categorization involves abstract concepts. In other words, it involves concepts that are based on ideas and qualities, rather than just physical things. An abstract painting, for example, shows impressions rather than what objects or people actually look like. Often, a person with ASD has difficulty learning about abstract things and distinguishing between concrete and abstract.

Symbols such as traffic signs, conceptual figures using arrows, circles, squares, or triangles, are also abstract. As many people with ASD have good visual skills, some may learn and recognize visual symbols with little apparent difficulty. However, they may have trouble understanding the meaning of those symbols. Therefore, it is necessary to teach the meanings of icons or symbols that are used in categorization activities. Bock (1994, 1999) developed a categorization strategy to teach this skill to children and youth with ASD. Teaching individuals on the spectrum to categorize according to three different variables such as color, shape, and size, Bock reports that these categorization strategies have generalized to help children with ASD sort laundry, stock groceries, and use appropriate verb tenses.

Making Up Rules

Another reason categorization is so difficult for people with ASD is that many make up their own rules, strategies, or explanations. Studies have shown that many children across autism spectrum use idiosyncratic or stereotypic (habitual) strategies when learning. (Prior, 1979). Just as a superstitious baseball player may always wear a certain pair of socks or drive exactly the same route to the ballfield, as if the outcome of the game depended on these routines, a child with ASD may have a strategy that has nothing to do with the task at hand. For example, silverware may be sorted by every third piece or by every piece that is facing diagonally on the table, or every piece that clinks a certain tone should be placed together. (You’ll notice that these are still categorized, but not by what is meaningful to most of us!) As these made-up rules are usually ineffective to the task at hand, it is important to directly teach the rules that a child must follow for success.

Key Points:

• Words help people categorize. For those who think visually, categorization is very difficult.
• In order to categorize, individuals must be able to pay attention to relevant features. For those who focus too much, too little, or get stuck on certain details, categorization is very difficult.
• Categorization involves abstract concepts based on ideas, qualities and symbols, and can be very difficult for "literal thinkers."
• Categorization involves rules and patterns. For those who make up their own rules, categorization can be very difficult.

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