Giovannini Lorena, Jacomuzzi Alessandra C, Bruno Nicola, Semenza Carlo, Surian Luca
Department of Psychology, University of Trieste, via S Anastasio 12, I 34134 Trieste, Italy.
Perception. 2009;38(3):429-41. doi: 10.1068/p6266.
Children with autism and typically developing children walked blindfolded to a previously seen target (blindwalking task) and matched the frontal to the sagittal extent of a pattern formed by ropes on the ground (L-matching task). All participants were accurate in the blindwalking task. Children with autism were also very accurate in the matching task. By contrast, in the matching task typically developing children made substantial underestimations that were inversely correlated with age. These findings support models that posit independent representations for the egocentric distance to a target location and for the spatial extent to a target object relative to the other spatial extents. These latter representations involve a form of large-scale pattern perception that may mature more slowly than representations of egocentric distance and develop atypically in autism.
患有自闭症的儿童和发育正常的儿童被蒙住眼睛走向先前看到的目标（蒙眼行走任务），并使地面上由绳索形成的图案的前后范围与矢状范围相匹配（L匹配任务）。所有参与者在蒙眼行走任务中都表现准确。患有自闭症的儿童在匹配任务中也非常准确。相比之下，在匹配任务中，发育正常的儿童存在明显的低估，且与年龄呈负相关。这些发现支持了一些模型，这些模型假定对于到目标位置的自我中心距离以及相对于其他空间范围的目标物体的空间范围存在独立的表征。后一种表征涉及一种大规模图案感知形式，其成熟速度可能比自我中心距离的表征更慢，并且在自闭症中发育异常。
