Processing of compound visual stimuli by children with autism and Asperger syndrome

A typical modes of visual processing are common in individuals with autism. In particular, and unlike typically developing children, children with autism tend to process the parts of a complex object as a priority, rather than attending to the object as a whole. This bias for local processing is likely to be due to difficulties in assembling subparts into a coherent whole, as proposed by Frith (1989) using the term “weak central coherence” or WCC. This study was aimed to better characterize the processing of complex visual stimuli by children with autism. Thirteen children with autistic spectrum disorders were individually paired with children of two control groups, one matched on verbal mental age (VMA) and one matched on chronological age (CA). Participants from the three groups were tested in two tasks. The first task involved hierarchical global/local stimuli, inspired by Navon (1977). The second task employed compound face‐like or geometrical stimuli. This task emphasized the processing of configural properties of the stimuli (i.e., spatial relationships). Children from the three groups showed a perceptual bias favouring the global dimension of the stimuli in the first task. By contrast, children with autism were deficient compared to normal children for the processing of the configural dimensions of the stimuli in the second task. These results suggest that visual cognition of children with autism is characterized by a dissociation between global and configural processing, with global processing being preserved and configural processing being altered in these children, therefore delineating the extents and limits of the WCC theory (Frith, 1989). Les individus souffrant d'un syndrome autistique présentent souvent des comportements visuels atypiques. Contrairement aux sujets sains, ces individus traitent en priorité les parties des objets visuels complexes, plutôt que de traiter l'objet comme un tout. Ce biais en faveur du traitement local est probablement dû aux difficultés rencontrées par ces individus pour assembler les différentes parties d'un objet entre elles. Cette difficulté a été désignée comme révélant un déficit de cohérence centrale (weak central coherence, Frith, 1989). Le but de cette étude était de mieux caractériser le traitement des stimuli visuels complexes par les enfants autistes. Les performances de 13 enfants autistes ont été comparées à celles de 13 enfants appariés sur l'âge mental verbal et à celles de 13 autres enfants apparié