not using context to disambiguate homographs Happé 1997). So, for example, people with ASC can read text for meaning, but unless asked to do so explicitly, their default approach may be to read a story as if it were just a list of words (e.g. This bias can be overcome, just as NTs can overcome their preference for meaning to memorize “meaningless” information such as telephone numbers or bank codes. Studies to date suggest that weak coherence is a cognitive style, not deficit, and may be best conceptualized as an information-processing bias towards local or featural information (Booth and Happé 2010).
#CENTRAL COHERENCE DEFICIT AUTISM CRACK#
A recent poster by the National Autistic Society in the UK showed a close-up of an eye, with the words, “When a person with autism walks into a room, the first thing they see is: A pillow with a coffee stain shaped like Africa, a train ticket sticking out of a magazine, 25 floorboards, a remote control, a paperclip on the mantelpiece, a marble under the chair, a crack in the ceiling, 12 grapes in a bowl, a piece of gum, a book of stamps… so it’s not surprising they ignore you completely.” The idea of weak coherence fits with descriptions by individuals with ASD of their own experience: for example, Gunilla Gerland ( 1997) writes, “ Every little bit of fact seemed to land in its own compartment in my head and refused to be linked with any other.” The emphasis on understanding strengths, as well as weaknesses, in ASD has been particularly welcomed and has led to “weak” coherence often being referred to instead as “detail-focused” processing. The notion that people with ASD have a more detail-focused processing style than NTs has become popular not only with researchers but also with teachers, parents, and those with ASD. Kanner’s interest in global–local processing in ASD, and its relationship with insistence on sameness, is reflected in the title of his 1951 paper, “The conception of wholes and parts in early infantile autism.”
If the slightest ingredient is altered or removed, the total situation is no longer the same and therefore is not accepted as such” (Kanner 1943, p.
#CENTRAL COHERENCE DEFICIT AUTISM FULL#
The concept of weak coherence is reflected in Kanner’s first reports of autism as involving an “inability to experience wholes without full attention to the constituent parts… 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.
Together with Amita Shah, she demonstrated that people with ASD were better than IQ-matched comparison groups on the Block Design and Embedded Figures Tests, demonstrating facility in seeing the parts without being distracted by the whole picture. She hypothesized that the drive for coherence was weaker in people with ASD and suggested that this would make them better than neurotypicals (NTs) at some tasks. The term “central coherence” was coined by Uta Frith in her influential 1989 book “Autism: Explaining the Enigma.” This drive for coherence, in Frith’s words, “ pulls together large amounts of information” like the tributaries of a river, and “ without this type of high-level cohesion, pieces of information would just remain pieces, be they small pieces or large pieces” (p.
0 kommentar(er)
