Strong Bias Towards Analytic Perception in ASD Does not Necessarily Come at the Price of Impaired Integration Skills

We first demonstrated analytic processing in ASD under conditions in which integral processing seems mandatory in TD observers, a pattern that is often taken to indicate a local default processing in ASD. However, this processing bias does not inevitably come at the price of impaired integration skills. Indeed, examining the same group of individuals with ASD on a task with explicit demands for integrated representations, Experiment 2 showed that the same observers with ASD demonstrated intact spatial integration. The results further showed that performance was not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively comparable to that of TD observers, demonstrating the sensitivity of integration in ASD to the same interactive effects of Gestalt cues.