Language & Development Seminar Series: Do autistic children really see details at the expense of the whole?

Prominent theories, such as Weak Central Coherence and Enhanced Perceptual Functioning, suggest that autistic individuals show an atypical balance between local and global processing – perhaps focusing on details at the expense of the overall whole. In this talk, I will revisit two tasks that have been used previously to provide evidence for these theories within the domain of visual perception: motion coherence and visual illusions. I will argue that reports of group differences on these tasks cannot be taken as evidence of weakened global and/or enhanced local processing, as often claimed. I will present data from alternative, novel tasks that can more accurately inform on the nature of autistic perception. I will conclude that theories proposing altered local/global processing do not account well for visual perception in autism