Behrmann Marlene, Avidan Galia, Leonard Grace Lee, Kimchi Rutie, Luna Beatriz, Humphreys Kate, Minshew Nancy
Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890, USA.
Neuropsychologia. 2006;44(1):110-29. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2005.04.002.
Studies of the perceptual performance of individuals with autism have focused, to a large extent, on two domains of visual behavior, one associated with face processing and the other associated with global or holistic processing. Whether autistic individuals differ from neurotypical individuals in these domains is debatable and, moreover, the relationship between the behaviors in these two domains remains unclear. We first compared the face processing ability of 14 adult individuals with autism with that of neurotypical controls and showed that the autistic individuals were slowed in their speed of face discrimination. We then showed that the two groups differed in their ability to derive the global whole in two different tasks, one using hierarchical compound letters and the other using a microgenetic primed matching task with geometric shapes, with the autistic group showing a bias in favor of local information. A significant correlation was also observed between performance on the face task and the configural tasks. We then confirmed the prediction that the ability to derive the global whole is not only critical for faces but also for other objects as well, as the autistic individuals performed more slowly than the control group in discriminating between objects. Taken together, the results suggest that the bias for local processing seen in autistic individuals might have an adverse impact on their ability to process faces and objects.
对自闭症个体感知能力的研究在很大程度上聚焦于视觉行为的两个领域，一个与面部处理相关，另一个与整体或全局处理相关。自闭症个体在这些领域是否与神经典型个体存在差异尚无定论，此外，这两个领域行为之间的关系仍不明确。我们首先比较了14名成年自闭症个体与神经典型对照组的面部处理能力，结果显示自闭症个体在面部辨别速度上较慢。然后我们发现，两组在两项不同任务中提取全局整体的能力存在差异，一项任务使用分层复合字母，另一项任务使用带有几何形状的微基因启动匹配任务，自闭症组表现出偏向局部信息的倾向。在面部任务和构型任务的表现之间也观察到显著相关性。然后我们证实了这一预测，即提取全局整体的能力不仅对面部至关重要，对其他物体也同样重要，因为自闭症个体在辨别物体时比对照组表现得更慢。综合来看，结果表明自闭症个体中观察到的局部处理偏向可能会对他们处理面部和物体的能力产生不利影响。
