Autism: beyond “theory of mind”

Abstract

The theory of mind account of autism has been remarkably successful in making specific predictions about the impairments in socialization, imagination and communication shown by people with autism. It cannot, however, explain either the non-triad features of autism, or earlier experimental findings of abnormal assets and deficits on non-social tasks. These unexplained aspects of autism, and the existence of autistic individuals who consistently pass false belief tasks, suggest that it may be necessary to postulate an additional cognitive abnormality. One possible abnormality -weak central coherence -is discussed, and preliminary evidence for this theory is presented.

Brief Report: Recognition of Emotional and Non-emotional Biological Motion in Individuals with Autistic Spectrum Disorders

“…This finding appears in contradiction with the weak central coherence (WCC) theory. This theory argues that people with autism have an inherent bias towards processing parts of stimuli and an inability to integrate these into a gestalt (Frith & Happe´, 1994) with a local bias reported both for non-social stimuli (e.g., Happe´, 1996) and for social stimuli such as faces (e.g., Gross, 2005).…”

Missing the big picture: impaired development of global shape processing in autism

“…This atypical sensitivity to local elements has been addressed in two theoretical frameworks. The Weak Central Coherence (WCC) theory posits that in ASD there is a strong bias to process featural and local information and a core deficit in the ability to integrate local information into a coherent global gestalt [Frith, 1989;Frith & Happé, 1994;Happé & Frith, 2006]. Alternatively, the Enhanced Perceptual Functioning (EPF) model hypothesizes that autism is characterized by an atypical relationship between higherand lower-order cognitive processes, in that lower-level perceptual processes (i.e., processing of local information) are more developed, which is disruptive to the development of the higher-order processes [Mottron & Burack, 2001;Mottron, Dawson, Soulieres, Hubert, & Burack, 2006].…”

Susceptibility to Optical Illusions Varies as a Function of the Autism-Spectrum Quotient but not in Ways Predicted by Local–Global Biases

“…Originally, the theory proposed that weak central coherence was the cause of perceptual differences in ASD (Frith & Happé, 1994). Namely, perceptual differences in ASD were the result of a deficit in processing the global elements of a scene.…”