Graduate School of Frontiers Biosciences, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan.
Neuropsychologia. 2012 Apr;50(5):696-703. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.12.024. Epub 2012 Jan 9.
A weak central coherence theory in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) proposes that a cognitive bias toward local processing in ASD derives from a weakness in integrating local elements into a coherent whole. Using this theory, we hypothesized that shape perception through active touch, which requires sequential integration of sensorimotor traces of exploratory finger movements into a shape representation, would be impaired in ASD. Contrary to our expectation, adults with ASD showed superior performance in a haptic-to-visual delayed shape-matching task compared to adults without ASD. Accuracy in discriminating haptic lengths or haptic orientations, which lies within the somatosensory modality, did not differ between adults with ASD and adults without ASD. Moreover, this superior ability in inter-modal haptic-to-visual shape matching was not explained by the score in a unimodal visuospatial rotation task. These results suggest that individuals with ASD are not impaired in integrating sensorimotor traces into a global visual shape and that their multimodal shape representations and haptic-to-visual information transfer are more accurate than those of individuals without ASD.
自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的弱中央一致性理论提出，自闭症患者对局部处理的认知偏向源于将局部元素整合到一个连贯整体的能力较弱。基于这一理论，我们假设通过主动触觉进行的形状感知，需要将探索性手指运动的感觉运动痕迹顺序整合到形状表示中，在 ASD 中会受到损害。与我们的预期相反，与没有 ASD 的成年人相比，ASD 成年人在触觉到视觉的延迟形状匹配任务中表现出更好的成绩。在区分触觉长度或触觉方向（属于躯体感觉模态）的准确性方面，ASD 成年人和没有 ASD 的成年人之间没有差异。此外，这种在模态间触觉到视觉形状匹配方面的优越能力不能用单模态视空间旋转任务的分数来解释。这些结果表明，ASD 个体在将感觉运动痕迹整合到全局视觉形状方面没有受到损害，并且他们的多模态形状表示和触觉到视觉信息传递比没有 ASD 的个体更准确。
