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A Specific Autistic Trait that Modulates Visuospatial Illusion Susceptibility

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Abstract

Although several accounts of autism have predicted that the disorder should be associated with a decreased susceptibility to visual illusions, previous experimental results have been mixed. This study examined whether a link between autism and illusion susceptibility can be more convincingly demonstrated by assessing the relationships between susceptibility and the extent to which several individual autistic traits are exhibited as a continuum in a population of college students. A significant relationship was observed between the systemizing trait and susceptibility to a subset of the tested illusions (the rod-and-frame, Roelofs, Ponzo and Poggendorff illusions). These results provide support for the idea that autism involves an imbalance between the processing of local and global cues, more heavily weighted toward local features than in the typically developed individual.

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Notes

  1. Participants also completed additional tasks to assess other aspects of cognitive processing, including hidden figures, intuitive physics, digit symbol-coding and global-local processing. Whereas the present report is designed to specifically address questions that relate to illusion susceptibility and autism, the results from these additional tasks will be discussed elsewhere (for a preliminary report, see Dassonville et al. 2007).

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Acknowledgments

This work was derived from a portion of the doctoral dissertation of Elizabeth Walter, and was partially supported by an NIH Systems Physiology Training Grant (5-T32-GM07257). It was presented at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Vision Science Society. We thank Ulrich Mayr for his advice on the statistical analyses.

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Author notes

  1. Elizabeth Walter

    Present address: Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

  2. Tiana M. Bochsler

    Present address: Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, 97403-1227, USA

    Elizabeth Walter & Paul Dassonville

  2. Robert D. Clark Honors College and Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA

    Tiana M. Bochsler

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  1. Elizabeth Walter
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  2. Paul Dassonville
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  3. Tiana M. Bochsler
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Correspondence to Paul Dassonville.

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Walter, E., Dassonville, P. & Bochsler, T.M. A Specific Autistic Trait that Modulates Visuospatial Illusion Susceptibility. J Autism Dev Disord 39, 339–349 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-008-0630-2

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