Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Laboratory >

Enhanced Perceptual Functioning in Autism

01:20 / 12.01.07

Enhanced Perceptual Functioning in autism: An update, and eight principles of autistic perception is a paper that's fortunately made it into public so that you no longer have to read a journal to see it.

The basic idea is, they've been hunting around for some "core deficit" that exists in autistic people for a long time. This particular research team wondered if researchers had been barking up the wrong set of trees in putting forth social-centric and deficit-centric models of autism. What they appear to have found is a set of strengths in the area of perception (particularly the ability to divorce perception from higher-order thought when necessary) that autistic people have and non-autistic people lack. They propose a model of autistic cognition that is based in research on certain kinds of autistic people, rather than based in a comparison to non-autistic people.

This is interesting for all kinds of reasons, not least that it might be that it is more productive to look at autistic people in terms of having certain strengths that may (because of the shape of autistic development) also result in certain weaknesses, rather than in terms of being non-autistic people with inexplicable weaknesses and strengths tacked on seemingly at random. They seem to have their hands on a pattern here that makes a lot more sense than other ones that have been proposed.

03:43 / 12.01.07

this theory seems to be consistent with the work of the centre i worked at (until recently). the publications on their website include several on 'autistic genius' and similar - basically that yes, as you point out, the previously received notion of autism as a 'deficit' was misguided and it is the processing of details which are not overridden by the concept-forming part of 'normal' brains that allows autists seeming supernatural access to details and patterns.

see here for their publ'n page - you may find this work of interest. it has been discussed on 'lith before in threads on autism and on transcranial magnetic stimulation.

and yes, this view of what can be done, rather than what is mising, in autists is a very positive way forward. i'd be keen to discuss this more when i get a bit of time (this w/end?) to read the article closely. cheers for the post

10:55 / 12.01.07

The same research team found something else interesting with regard to whole and parts. It had been assumed for a long time that if autistic people had a strength in details, it was because of an inability to see the big picture at all. The weak central coherence model of autistic thinking was based on this construct -- that autistic people had sacrificed big-picture thinking in order to see the details more clearly.

Anyway, this research team did a study published in Brain recently called Cognitive mechanisms, specificity and neural underpinnings of visuospatial peaks in autism. As part of the study, they carefully looked at autistic people's ability to perform big-picture sort of tasks, and found that autistic people were in fact able to engage in them to the same degree or better than non-autistic people were. This made it clear that, unlike the ideas people like Frith (mentioned in one of the articles at the site you linked) put forward, autistic people's strengths in perception are not a result of weak central coherence but of something else. That's when they decided that it was more that non-autistic people were unable to switch off conceptualizing when it hindered perception, rather than autistic people unable to switch it on, since autistic people could clearly do both.

Also of note is that this strength doesn't have to be genius-level or spectacular in order to be present, although it does appear to account for a higher rate of savant skills among autistic people.

19:30 / 13.01.07

Hm, that's interesting. Although I'm finding the language difficult, hehe... Out of interest, what is the rate of savantism in autism (and, if you know - in Asperger's, and in the general population)?

02:12 / 14.01.07

The figures I have found are:

50% of savants are autistic.
10% of autistic people are savants.

(This from the Savant FAQ at the Wisconsin Medical Society.)

The "autistic people" in question don't appear to include people labeled Asperger or PDD-NOS. I can't find figures on those, but I know they exist. (For instance, Mozart and the Whale is a book by two savants with Asperger diagnoses who got married.) Maybe nobody's counted them yet, especially since (false) conventional wisdom is you have to have below a certain IQ to be a savant.

09:03 / 14.01.07

I agree, that seems like a very limiting definition of "savant". And, from my own PubMed searches, there appear to be no figures on the neurotypical population. Which is very unfortunate, since you can't therefore say that these skills are typical of autism/autism spectrum.