Do children with autism find it difficult to offer alternative interpretations to ambiguous figures?

Abstract

Previous research suggests that the ability to reverse ambiguous figures may be related to an understanding of one's own and others' mental states. We can infer from these findings that individuals who have difficulty representing mental states, such as those with autism, may also have difficulty reversing ambiguous figures. The results from our study, however, showed that a majority of those with autism easily succeeded in making alternative interpretations despite many making errors in tests of false belief. Many also had difficulty acknowledging that a less informed person would interpret a non-descript portion of a drawing differently than themselves. Comparison participants with moderate learning disabilities, who had a similar intellectual profile, generally performed well on the theory of mind tests and a majority made alternative interpretations of ambiguous figures. Typically developing children aged 7 and 8 years performed well on all tests. The ambiguity test does not require participants to understand that representations are open to revision, unlike theory of mind tests, and this might explain their good performance.

The Boundaries of the Cognitive Phenotype of Autism: Theory of Mind, Central Coherence and Ambiguous Figure Perception in Young People with Autistic Traits

“…Ropar et al (2003) did not measure informed reversals only perception of both interpretations of the figure. Sobel et al (2005) used three different ambiguous stimuli and asked participants three times during the course of viewing each stimulus if it had changed.…”

“…Following on from this work in typically developing children, two studies have investigated the perception of ambiguous figures in autism. In the first, Ropar et al (2003) examined whether children with autism would be able to identify the two alternate interpretations of an ambiguous figure. They found that the children with autism were just as able as controls with mild intellectual impairment to see the alternative interpretations of a figure with prompting.…”

“…This figure was the cat/swan as used by Ropar, Mitchell et al (2003). The figure was presented in black on a white background on laminated paper.…”

Visuo‐spatial abilities in autism: A review

“…Does this peculiarity arise specifically from the fact that the stimuli are hierarchical or would the peculiarity occur with any stimuli that can be interpreted in two different ways? A study reported by Ropar et al (2003) helps to address this question. Participants were presented with ambiguous figures, similar to the wellknown duck-rabbit, and tested on their ability to switch between the two interpretations.…”

The Relationship Between Subthreshold Autistic Traits, Ambiguous Figure Perception and Divergent Thinking

“…Previous research has found that young people with high levels of autistic traits see fewer reversals of an ambiguous figure (Best et al 2007). Developmental work with children with autism also suggests infrequent reversal is characteristic of autism (e.g., Ropar et al 2003;Sobel et al 2005; but see also Wimmer and Doherty 2010). Wiseman et al (2011) hypothesised that perception of ambiguous figures is related to creative insight.…”