Do high functioning persons with
autism Caron MJ Mottron
L, Rainville C, Chouinard S Abstract: Neuropsychologia 42 (2004) 467–481 Findings Many individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA) demonstrate superior performance in recognizing and discriminating hidden and embedded designs and figures. Brain studies have shown that children with autism use different neural pathways than typically developing children when trying to understand visual-spatial stimuli. This study was designed to assess the spatial abilities of children with HFA in several tests using a human-size labyrinth or maze; these tests measured childrens’ abilities to learn routes and find unseen locations, both forward and backwards in the maze. The abilities were tested under two different conditions: by exploring directly the environment and from a map. Two groups of adolescents and adults were studied—those with HFA (11) or Asperger syndrome (5) with normal IQs, and 16 typically developing participants matched to the test group for age and IQ. All individuals with HFA and Asperger syndrome performed at a level equivalent to control individuals in how they found a route and surveyed the maze. However, those individuals with HFA were better at tasks that involved using a visual map of the maze: they could read and recall a graphic of the maze and learned the maps more quickly than controls. Conclusions The authors propose that an individual’s superior ability to detect, match, and reproduce simple visual elements allows them to perform better in tasks relying on detection and graphic reproduction of visual elements that are included in a map. Individuals with autism appear to discriminate, detect, and memorize simple visual patterns better than typical individuals, which may account for their superior performance in visual-spatial tasks that rely on recognizing and memorizing landmarks or detecting similarities between a map and landmark features. Thus, in non-social settings, children with HFA and Asperger syndrome have superior spatial abilities than typically developing individuals, which has been seen in other similar studies of visual-spatial tests in these individuals. |