Boys with autism spectrum disorders show superior performance on the adult Embedded Figures Test
- Resource Type
- Authors
- Wouter Hulstijn; Wim A.J.M. Schlooz
- Source
- Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 8, pp. 1-7
Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 8, 1-7
- Subject
- medicine.medical_specialty
Action, intention, and motor control
media_common.quotation_subject
Perception, Action and Control [DI-BCB_DCC_Theme 2]
Audiology
Biologische psychologie
medicine.disease
behavioral disciplines and activities
Developmental psychology
Psychiatry and Mental health
Clinical Psychology
Typically developing
Asperger syndrome
Perception
mental disorders
Developmental and Educational Psychology
medicine
Cognitive development
Embedded Figures Test
Biological psychology
Autism
Psychology
media_common
- Language
- ISSN
- 1750-9467
Item does not contain fulltext Weak central coherence is frequently studied using the Embedded Figures Test (EFT) yielding mixed and ambiguous results. In this study, the performance of 36 boys (9–14 years) with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is compared with that of 46 typical peers using both the children's and the adult version of the EFT. Only in the adult version did the ASD group outperform the controls in terms of accuracy. Corrected for age and pIQ, a subgroup of boys with Autistic Disorder (AD) showed superior perceptual processing capacities, while the performance of boys with PDD-NOS and Asperger Syndrome was in between that of those with AD and the controls. The findings strongly suggest that children and adolescents with ASD will only show superior results on visual-perceptual tests if the task complexity and thus their sensitivity is sufficiently high to challenge typically developing age-matched peers. 7 p.