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Thinking in Pictures as a Cognitive Account of Autism

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Abstract

We analyze the hypothesis that some individuals on the autism spectrum may use visual mental representations and processes to perform certain tasks that typically developing individuals perform verbally. We present a framework for interpreting empirical evidence related to this “Thinking in Pictures” hypothesis and then provide comprehensive reviews of data from several different cognitive tasks, including the n-back task, serial recall, dual task studies, Raven’s Progressive Matrices, semantic processing, false belief tasks, visual search, spatial recall, and visual recall. We also discuss the relationships between the Thinking in Pictures hypothesis and other cognitive theories of autism including Mindblindness, Executive Dysfunction, Weak Central Coherence, and Enhanced Perceptual Functioning.

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Notes

  1. See Appendix 1. Surveyed studies include Koshino et al. (2005, 2008), Ozonoff and Strayer (2001), and Williams et al. (2005).

  2. See Appendix 2. Surveyed studies include Ameli et al. (1988), Bennetto et al. (1996), Joseph et al. (2005), Minshew and Goldstein (2001), Minshew et al. (1992, 1997), O’Connor and Hermelin (1967), Ozonoff and Strayer (2001), Russell et al. (1996), Whitehouse et al. (2006), and Williams et al. (2005, 2006, 2008).

  3. See Appendix 3. Surveyed studies include Jarrold et al. (2005), Keehn et al. (2008), O’Riordan (2000, 2004), O’Riordan and Plaisted (2001), O’Riordan et al. (2001), and Plaisted et al. (1998).

  4. See Appendix 4. Surveyed studies include Caron et al. (2004); Edgin and Pennington (2005), Luna et al. (2002), Minshew and Goldstein (2001), Minshew et al. (1992, 1997, 1999), Morris et al. (1999), Steele et al. (2007), Verté et al. (2005), Verté et al. (2006), and Williams et al. (2005, 2006).

  5. See Appendix 5. Surveyed studies include Ambery et al. (2006), Ameli et al. (1988), Gunter et al. (2002), Minshew and Goldstein (2001), Minshew et al. (1992, 1997), Ropar and Mitchell (2001), Verté et al. (2005), Verté et al. (2006), and Williams et al. (2006).

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by a grant (IIS Award 0534266) on “Multimodal Case-Based Reasoning in Modeling and Design” from the National Science Foundation, by a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship from the Office of Naval Research, and by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. The authors would like to thank A. Rozga for her careful reading of this manuscript, K. McGreggor and E. Schumacher for many discussions on this topic, and G. Abowd, R. Arriaga, and the rest of the Autism Research Group at the Georgia Tech/Emory Health Systems Institute for their encouragement and support of this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Design & Intelligence Laboratory, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 85 Fifth Street NW, Atlanta, GA, 30332, USA

    Maithilee Kunda & Ashok K. Goel

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  1. Maithilee Kunda
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  2. Ashok K. Goel
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Correspondence to Maithilee Kunda.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Table 2 Review of results from published studies of the n-back task in autism
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Appendix 2

Table 3 Review of results from published studies of serial recall tasks in autism
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Appendix 3

Table 4 Review of results from published studies of target/distracter visual search tasks in autism
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Appendix 4

Table 5 Review of results from published studies of spatial recall tasks in autism
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Appendix 5

See Table 6.

Table 6 Review of results from published studies of visual recall tasks in autism
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Kunda, M., Goel, A.K. Thinking in Pictures as a Cognitive Account of Autism. J Autism Dev Disord 41, 1157–1177 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-010-1137-1

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