Department of Physiology, Juntendo University School of Medicine, Tokyo, Japan.
Proc Biol Sci. 2010 Apr 7;277(1684):1027-30. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1713. Epub 2009 Dec 2.
Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are superior in processing local features. Frith and Happe conceptualize this cognitive bias as 'weak central coherence', implying that a local enhancement derives from a weakness in integrating local elements into a coherent whole. The suggested deficit has been challenged, however, because individuals with ASD were not found to be inferior to normal controls in holistic perception. In these opposing studies, however, subjects were encouraged to ignore local features and attend to the whole. Therefore, no one has directly tested whether individuals with ASD are able to integrate local elements over time into a whole image. Here, we report a weakness of individuals with ASD in naming familiar objects moved behind a narrow slit, which was worsened by the absence of local salient features. The results indicate that individuals with ASD have a clear deficit in integrating local visual information over time into a global whole, providing direct evidence for the weak central coherence hypothesis.
自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）患者在处理局部特征方面表现出色。弗里斯和哈普将这种认知偏差概念化为“弱中央一致性”，这意味着局部增强源自将局部元素整合到一个连贯整体的弱点。然而，这种假设的缺陷受到了挑战，因为自闭症患者在整体感知方面并不逊于正常对照组。然而，在这些相互矛盾的研究中，研究人员鼓励被试忽略局部特征，关注整体。因此，没有人直接测试自闭症患者是否能够随时间将局部元素整合到整体图像中。在这里，我们报告了自闭症患者在命名通过狭窄缝隙移动的熟悉物体方面的弱点，而当局部显著特征缺失时，这种弱点会更加严重。研究结果表明，自闭症患者在随时间将局部视觉信息整合到整体全局方面存在明显缺陷，为弱中央一致性假设提供了直接证据。
