Do children with and without autism spectrum disorder use different visuospatial processing skills to perform the Rey–Osterrieth complex figure test?

Abstract

Visuospatial organization abilities are closely related to other visuospatial processing skills, such as visuomotor coordination, perceptual abilities, mental rotation, and working memory (WM). One task that enables visuospatial organization abilities to be investigated is the Rey-Osterrieth complex figure test (ROCFT). When examining visuospatial functioning, individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have proved capable of operating both locally and globally, depending on the sub-domain embraced, with a preference for a locallyoriented processing of visuospatial information. The present research aimed to establish whether different underlying visuospatial skills might account for performance in the ROCFT in children and adolescents with ASD, compared with typically developing (TD), by considering the role of local/global visuospatial processing. The study involved 39 participants who have ASD without intellectual disability, and 57 TD aged 8-16 years. The participants were administered tasks assessing visuospatial organization abilities, manual dexterity, visual perception, mental rotation, spatial-sequential, spatial-simultaneous WM, and visuospatial processing. Our results suggest that manual dexterity and visuospatial processing similarly explain performance in both groups, while differences in visuospatial WM account for the two groups' visuospatial organization abilities. Spatialsimultaneous WM predicted performance in copy and recall conditions in the TD group but not in the ASD group, while spatial-sequential WM only did so in the latter group, reinforcing the tendency of children with ASD towards local bias in the visuospatial organization domain. The implications of these findings are discussed. Lay SummaryThe visuospatial organization abilities of children and adolescents with and without autism were compared, considering their underlying visuospatial skills. Visuospatial organization impairments emerged for children with autism, who differed from typically developing children in the underlying visuospatial skills involved. Given the crucial role of visuospatial organization abilities in everyday life, our results could inspire practitioners to develop training interventions that take into account the strengths and weaknesses of individuals with autism.

Development of an eye-tracking system based on a deep learning model to assess executive function in patients with mental illnesses

“…These results indicate that eye movements during the encoding of highly complex gures re ect executive function during visuospatial memory encoding, serving as a biomarker of impairment. Additionally, as the assessment model in this study utilized a data-driven deep learning technique that does not require handcrafted feature selection based on speci c disease hypotheses, it has the potential to extend beyond early psychosis and OCD to other psychiatric and neurological disorders that also exhibit impaired executive function, poor performance in the RCFT in the form of disorganized and fragmented drawings, and di culties in visuospatial integration [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] .…”

“…Both patient groups commonly exhibit signi cantly lower RCFT immediate recall scores and organization scores than healthy controls (HCs), stemming from executive function de cits during visuospatial memory encoding 3,5,7 . These cognitive de cits are also often observed in patients with various psychiatric and neurological disorders, such as bipolar disorder, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, closed head injury, autism, epilepsy, encephalitis, multiple sclerosis, and ischemic stroke, who exhibit brain dysfunctions [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] .…”

Estudo De Validade Clínica Da Avaliação Quantitativa Da Figura Complexa De Rey (Rocf) E Qualitativa Do Sistema Brasileiro (Bras-Rocf) Em Crianças E Adolescentes Com Tea

“…Em recente revisão sistemática sobre o perfil cognitivo do TEA (Fernández et al, 2022) foram relacionados 4 estudos sobre habilidades visuoespaciais. Neles se constatou alteração dos padrões na memória de trabalho e processamento visuoperceptivo, apontando para dificuldades na capacidade de integração da informação espacial (Cardillo et al, 2022). Tal fato sustenta a ideia de um processamento global prejudicado devido ao processamento fragmentado da informação no TEA.…”