Is the ability to integrate parts into wholes affected in autism spectrum disorder?

There is considerable debate about whether people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are biased toward local information and whether this disrupts their ability to integrate two complex shapes elements into a single figure. Moreover, few have examined the relationship between integration ability and ASD symptom severity. Adolescent/adult males with ASD and age and IQ-matched controls were compared on their performance of a simple silhouette-to-shape matching task and a higher-order shape-integration task. Relative to basic silhouette-to-shape matching, ASD participants were disproportionately slower than controls on shape-integration. Moreover, this relative slowing correlated with increased symptom severity in ASD participants. These findings support the notion that integrating local information is disproportionately more challenging in ASD; this weakness may play a role in ASD symptomatology.