![]() Superior performance on visuospatial tasks that benefit from detail focus (e.g., Block Design, Embedded Figures) has been reported in more than a dozen studies comparing ASD and matched control groups. The literature pertaining to coherence in ASD has grown rapidly during the past 10 years, and an exhaustive summary is beyond the scope of this article (for a review, see Happé & Frith, 2006). ![]() ![]() ![]() … A situation, a performance, a sentence is not regarded as complete if it is not made up of exactly the same elements that were present at the time the child was first confronted with it” (p. Indeed, Kanner (1943), who first named the syndrome, described as central to autism an “inability to experience wholes without full attention to the constituent parts. Weak coherence is postulated to lie at the root of characteristic ASD symptoms such as insistence on sameness, attention to parts of objects, and uneven cognitive profile, including savant skills (see Happé & Frith, 2006). People with ASD appear to show “weak” coherence, attending preferentially to details, apparently at the expense of meaning, gist, and gestalt (perhaps essential for social cognition) ( Joseph, Keehn, Connolly, Wolfe, & Horowitz, 2009). Specifically, coherence refers to the tendency to integrate information in context for higher level meaning or gestalt, often at the expense of attention to or memory for featural information. Attempting to address the assets seen in ASD, the “weak central coherence” account proposes that people with ASD show (alongside sociocognitive deficits) a bias in cognitive style. Current cognitive accounts of ASD have focused primarily on the areas of impairment, proposing as explanations deficits in “theory of mind,” executive functions, and so forth. The Sentence Completion Task was found to be a useful test instrument, capable of tapping local processing bias in a range of populations.Īutism and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are characterized not only by social and communicative deficits but also by restricted interests and activities and an uneven profile of cognitive abilities in which remarkable talents in certain visuospatial and memory tasks are notable (e.g., Jolliffe & Baron-Cohen, 1997 Shah & Frith, 1983, 1993). The results suggest that the Sentence Completion Task can reveal individual differences in cognitive style unrelated to IQ in typical development, that most (but not all) people with ASD show weak coherence on this task, and that performance is not related to inhibitory control. We report results from three studies assessing (a) 176 typically developing (TD) 8- to 25-year-olds, (b) individuals with ASD and matched controls, and (c) matched groups with ASD or attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We present a brief and easy-to-administer test of coherence requiring global sentence completions. Little research has examined whether individual differences in this cognitive style can be found in typical development, independent of intelligence, and how local processing relates to executive control. A local processing bias, referred to as “weak central coherence,” has been postulated to underlie key aspects of autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
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