Perceptual Processing among High-functioning Persons with Autism

doi:10.1111/1469-7610.00433

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Wiley InterScience

Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry

Volume 40 Issue 2, Pages 203 - 211

Published Online: 13 Oct 2003

Published on behalf of the Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health

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Perceptual Processing among High-functioning Persons with Autism

Laurent Mottron ¹ , Jacob A. Burack ² , Johannes E. A. Stauder ³ & Philippe Robaey ⁴

¹ Clinique Spécialisée de l'Autisme et Service de recherche, Hôpital Rivière-des-Prairies, and Université de Montréal, Canada, ²McGill University, Montreal, Canada, ³Maastricht University, The Netherlands, ⁴Universitéde Montréal and Centre de Recherche de l'Hôpital Sainte-Justine, Montréal, Canada

KEYWORDS

Autistic disorder • hierarchical stimuli • local-global processing • perception

ABSTRACT

Two tasks were used to assess the processing of whole versus parts of objects in a group of high-functioning children and adolescents with autism (N = 11) and a comparison group of typically developing peers (N = 11) matched for chronological age and IQ. In the first task, only the children with autism showed a global advantage, and the two groups showed similar interference between levels. In the second task, the children with autism, despite longer RTs, showed similar performance to the comparison group with regard to the effect of goodness on visual parsing. Contrary to expectations based on the central coherence and hierarchisation deficit theories, these findings indicate intact holistic processing among persons with autism. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to apparently discrepant evidence from other studies.

Accepted: 18 February 1998;

DIGITAL OBJECT IDENTIFIER (DOI)

10.1111/1469-7610.00433 About DOI