Happé F
Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Research Centre, 111 Denmark Hill, London, UK SE9 8AF.
Trends Cogn Sci. 1999 Jun;3(6):216-222. doi: 10.1016/s1364-6613(99)01318-2.
Autism is a developmental disorder characterized by impaired social and communicative development, and restricted interests and activities. This article will argue that we can discover more about developmental disorders such as autism through demonstrations of task success than through examples of task failure. Even in exploring and explaining what people with autism find difficult, such as social interaction, demonstration of competence on contrasting tasks has been crucial to defining the nature of the specific deficit. Deficit accounts of autism cannot explain, however, the assets seen in this disorder; for example, savant skills in maths, music and drawing, and islets of ability in visuospatial tests and rote memory. An alternative account, reviewed here, suggests that autism is characterized by a cognitive style biased towards local rather than global information processing - termed 'weak central coherence'. Evidence that weak coherence might also characterize the relatives of people with autism, and form part of the extended phenotype of this largely genetic disorder, is discussed. This review concludes by considering some outstanding questions concerning the specific cognitive mechanism for coherence and the neural basis of individual differences in this aspect of information processing.
自闭症是一种发育障碍，其特征为社交和沟通发展受损，以及兴趣和活动受限。本文将论证，相较于通过任务失败的例子，我们通过任务成功的展示能够更多地了解自闭症等发育障碍。即使在探索和解释自闭症患者觉得困难的事情（比如社交互动）时，在对比任务中展现出能力对于界定特定缺陷的本质也至关重要。然而，自闭症的缺陷理论无法解释这种障碍中所呈现出的优势；例如，在数学、音乐和绘画方面的学者技能，以及在视觉空间测试和死记硬背方面的能力孤岛。本文所综述的另一种理论认为，自闭症的特征是一种偏向于局部而非整体信息处理的认知风格——即所谓的“弱中央统合”。文中还讨论了弱中央统合也可能是自闭症患者亲属的特征，并构成这种主要由基因决定的障碍的扩展表型一部分的证据。本文通过思考一些关于统合的特定认知机制以及信息处理这一方面个体差异的神经基础的突出问题来结束综述。
