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Are Individuals with Autism and Asperger's Syndrome Susceptible to Visual Illusions?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 1999

Danielle Ropar  and
Peter Mitchell
Danielle Ropar
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham, U.K.
Peter Mitchell
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham, U.K.
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Abstract

A recent finding that individuals with autism are not susceptible to illusions has been explained by Happé (1996) as a sign of “weak central coherence” at lower levels of processing. We investigated the phenomenon with a more sophisticated measure. In Experiment 1, individuals with autism, Asperger's syndrome, moderate learning difficulties, and typical development adjusted certain comparison lines and circles to make them appear to be the same size in four visual illusions. With a minor exception, the participants with autism and Asperger's syndrome evinced a systematic bias in their judgements in the illusion condition. The extent of this was no different from control participants. In a second experiment, a similar finding was obtained in a task where participants made verbal judgements about the stimuli. The results suggest that lower-level coherence in visual processing in autism is intact.

Keywords

AutismAsperger's syndromeweak central coherenceillusions
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines , Volume 40 , Issue 8 , November 1999 , pp. 1283 - 1293
Copyright
© 1999 Association for Child Psychology and Psychiatry

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