Autistic traits in neurotypical individuals are associated with increased landmark use during navigation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
People adopt two distinct learning strategies during navigation. "Spatial learners" navigate by building a cognitive map using environmental landmarks, and display more grey matter in the hippocampus. Conversely, "response learners" memorize a series of rigid turns to navigate and display more grey matter in the caudate nucleus of the striatum. Evidence has linked these two structures with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and autistic traits in non-clinical populations. Both people with ASD and neurotypical people with higher levels of autistic traits have been shown to display more grey matter in the hippocampus and less functional activity in the caudate nucleus. We therefore tested 56 healthy participants who completed the Autism Quotient (AQ) Scale and the 4-on-8 Virtual Maze (4/8 VM), which determines the reliance on landmarks during navigation. We found that people who relied on landmarks during navigation also displayed significantly higher scores on the AQ Scale. Because spatial strategies are associated with increased attention to environmental landmark use and are supported by the hippocampus, our results provide a potential behavioral mechanism linking higher autistic traits (e.g., increased attention to detail and increased sensory processes) to increased hippocampal grey matter.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it