Institute of Psychology, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands,
J Autism Dev Disord. 2014 Sep;44(9):2230-43. doi: 10.1007/s10803-014-2107-9.
Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have been assumed to show evidence of abnormal visuospatial processing, which has been attributed to a failure to integrate local features into coherent global Gestalts and/or to a bias towards local processing. As the available data are based on baseline performance only, which does not provide insight into cognitive/neural plasticity and actual cognitive potential, we investigated how training-resistant possible visuospatial processing differences between children with and without ASD are. In particular, we studied the effect of computerized versus face-to-face visuospatial training in a group of normally intelligent children with ASD and typically developing children as control. Findings show that (a) children with and without ASD do not differ much in visuospatial processing (as assessed by a tangram-like task) and the few differences we observed were all eliminated by training; (b) training can improve visuospatial processing (equally) in both children with ASD and normally developing children; and (c) computer-based and face-to-face training was equally effective.
自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）患者被认为存在异常的视空间处理证据，这归因于无法将局部特征整合到连贯的整体 Gestalts 中，或者偏向于局部处理。由于现有数据仅基于基线表现，无法深入了解认知/神经可塑性和实际认知潜力，因此我们研究了自闭症和非自闭症儿童之间可能存在的视空间处理差异的抗拒训练程度。具体来说，我们研究了计算机化与面对面视空间训练对一组具有 ASD 的正常智力儿童和对照组正常发育儿童的影响。研究结果表明：（a）自闭症和非自闭症儿童在视空间处理（通过类似七巧板的任务评估）方面差异不大，我们观察到的少数差异都可以通过训练消除；（b）训练可以同等地提高自闭症和正常发育儿童的视空间处理能力；（c）基于计算机的和面对面的训练同样有效。
