Are autistic people lost in space?

Inone short paper, Elizabeth Pellicano and colleagues claim to demolish Simon Baron Cohen ' ssystemizing account of autism. They also conclude that autistics ' strong visual search andprobabilisticlearningabilities fail in large-scale space, ergo in the real world.Thepress release starts by declaring that autistic children " lack visual skills required for independence " and does not exaggerate the claims in the paper, which merit a lot of scrutiny. So bear with me, this is not going to be short. First what they did (and didn ' t do), then what they found, then what it means.1. What did they do? And what didn ' t they do?Pellicano et al. ' s purpose was to assess systemizing in autism by testing autistic visual search abilities in true-to-life large-scale space. And this research group has the set-up for it--aroom-size visual search task. Except they ignored this possibility, instead choosing what they themselves call a test of "non-visually guided foraging. "In other words, Pellicano et al. do not include visual search tasks at any scale, so you can ' t draw conclusions from their paper about visual search abilities in autism.From Figure 1, here is what Pellicano et al. ' s foraging task looked like:It took place in a 4m by 4m space arranged as shown. In two 20-trial blocks, 20 autistic and 20 nonautistic children (age ~11yrs) had to find which of 16 green floor lights, eight on each side of a midline, turned red when pressed. The children were not told that 80% of the conce...
Source: The Autism Crisis - Category: Child Development Source Type: blogs