Autistic Tendencies and Visual Processing: A Local Bias versus a Global Deficit

Past research suggests that individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) exhibit an enhanced locally-oriented processing bias, but have an attenuated tendency to use global contextual cues. In addition, the autistic trait of systemizing has recently been found to predict sensitivity to global contextual cues, where high systemizing tendencies are associated with a decreased tendency to pro- cess misleading global context (e.g., visual illusions.) It is currently unclear, however, whether individuals with heightened systemizing drives, such as those with autism, display the same decreased tendency to process context when it provides information beneficial to performance. The current study examined the extent to which systemizing tendencies were predictive of whether individuals could use beneficial global-contextual information in two perceptual tasks. For two different visual tasks we found a significant benefit of the presence of an upright frame (compared to no frame), and no correlation with the autism and systemizing quotients and the extent to which participants benefited from the global context of the frame. These results suggest that individuals with heightened systemizing drives, such as those with autism, can still utilize global information when it is beneficial to performance.