Mottron L, Belleville S, Ménard E
Université de Montréal and Hôpital Rivière-des-Prairies, Qc, Canada.
J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 1999 Jul;40(5):743-55.
In the present study, copying tasks were used to assess hierarchical aspects of visual perception in a group of 10 nonsavant autistic individuals with normal intelligence. In Experiment 1, the hierarchical order of graphic construction and the constancy of this order were measured for the copying of objects and nonobjects. In comparison to control participants, autistic individuals produced more local features at the start of the copying. However, they did not differ from controls with respect to graphic constancy. Experiment 2 measured the effect of geometrical impossibility on the copying of figures. Results revealed that autistic individuals were less affected by figure impossibility than were controls. Therefore, these experiments seem to support the notion of a local bias for visual information processing in individuals with autism. Two interpretations are proposed to account for this effect. According to the hierarchical deficit hypothesis, individuals with autism do not manifest the normal global bias in perceiving scenes and objects. Alternatively, the executive function hypothesis suggests that autism brings about limitations in the complexity of information that can be manipulated in short-term visual memory during graphic planning.
在本研究中，采用临摹任务来评估一组10名智力正常的非天才自闭症个体的视觉感知层次方面。在实验1中，测量了临摹物体和非物体时图形构建的层次顺序以及该顺序的稳定性。与对照组参与者相比，自闭症个体在临摹开始时产生了更多局部特征。然而，在图形稳定性方面，他们与对照组没有差异。实验2测量了几何不可能性对图形临摹的影响。结果显示，自闭症个体比对照组受图形不可能性的影响更小。因此，这些实验似乎支持了自闭症个体在视觉信息处理上存在局部偏向的观点。针对这一效应提出了两种解释。根据层次缺陷假说，自闭症个体在感知场景和物体时没有表现出正常的全局偏向。或者，执行功能假说表明，自闭症会导致在图形规划过程中短期视觉记忆中可操作信息的复杂性受到限制。
