Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder characterized by disrupted language development and atypical patterns of interacting with objects. Evidence suggests that this stems from a tendency for children with autism to focus on isolated details in their environments. Typically developing (TD) children, on the other hand, tend to focus on overall impressions, a bias that appears to follow a prescribed developmental course. For example, while early on TD children tend to focus on fine grain detail to categorize objects, later on they focus on an objects’ overall shape.

The current study investigates whether the same developmental progression holds for children with autism. In particular, the study explores how the vocabulary size of children with autism relates to their ability to categorize objects on the basis of their overall shape (vs. fine-grain detail). This is a first step towards mapping out the relation between autism and the development of an adaptive tendency to detect higher-order Gestalts. Click here to participate!