The idea for this special section of the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders came from a Scientific Panel which took place at the 2014 International Meeting for Autism Research in San Diego, CA, organized by Dr. Bart Boets, with one of us (Dr. David Simmons) as the Discussant. The panel, entitled “Towards an integrated neurocognitive account of local versus global processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders” was a consideration of the evidence in favour of “superior” local processing and/or “inferior” global processing in autism in the light of both our own general review of the literature on vision in Autism Spectrum Disorder (Simmons et al.
2009) and the more recent publication, from the Leuven group of which Dr. Boets was then a part, of a meta-analysis focused on the topic (van der Hallen et al.
2015). …
