Department of Brain and Cognitive Science and McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Building 46 Room 4141 (Kanwisher Lab), Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA,
J Autism Dev Disord. 2013 Oct;43(10):2329-40. doi: 10.1007/s10803-013-1777-z.
It is widely suggested that ASD is characterized by atypical local/global processing, but the published findings are contradictory. In an effort to resolve this question, we tested a large group of children on both a free-choice task and an instructed task using hierarchical local-global stimuli. We find that although children with autism showed a reduced preference to report global properties of a stimulus when given a choice, their ability to process global properties when instructed to do so is unimpaired. These findings support prior claims that people with ASD show a disinclination, not a disability, in global processing, and highlight the broader question of whether other characteristics of autism may also reflect disinclinations rather than disabilities.
人们普遍认为，自闭症谱系障碍的特征是异常的局部/整体加工，但已发表的研究结果存在矛盾。为了解决这个问题，我们使用层次化的局部-整体刺激，对一大群儿童进行了自由选择任务和指令任务的测试。我们发现，尽管自闭症儿童在自由选择时表现出对刺激整体属性的报告偏好降低，但当被要求这样做时，他们处理整体属性的能力并未受损。这些发现支持了先前的观点，即自闭症患者表现出的是对整体加工的不情愿，而不是障碍，并突出了自闭症的其他特征是否也可能反映出不情愿而不是障碍这一更广泛的问题。
