Gestalt Processing in Autistic Adolescents

Previous research has documented that individuals with autism preferentially attend to local rather than global elements of a visual scene. We tested another pre-attentive phenomenon - gestalt processing - to investigate whether the global processing deficits seen in autism extend to gestalt processing. We asked 5 individuals with low functioning autism and 13 typically developing individuals to point to the odd item in a four-item display to test ability and speed in using gestalt principles of proximity, similarity and closure. As expected, the control group was significantly faster at responding to gestalt-grouped targets than targets differing in only a single feature. However, individuals with autism did not show a significant difference in reaction time between conditions, implying that parsing gestalt relationships is as taxing as processing single features. Both groups were generally more accurate in the gestalt condition. Taken together, these findings suggest that although the ability to process gestalt relationships appears to be intact in autism, gestalt processing may not be a pre-attentive process for this sample. Implications and future directions are discussed.