A Study of Perceptual Analysis in a High-Level Autistic Subject with Exceptional Graphic Abilities

We report here the case study of a patient (E.C.) with an Asperger syndrome, or autism with quasinormal intelligence, who shows an outstanding ability for three-dimensional drawing of inanimate objects (savant syndrome). An assessment of the subsystems proposed in recent models of object recognition...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inBrain and cognition Vol. 23; no. 2; pp. 279 - 309
Main Authors Mottron, L., Belleville, S.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published San Diego, CA Elsevier Inc 01.11.1993
Elsevier
Subjects
Adult
Adult and adolescent clinical studies
Autistic Disorder - complications
Autistic Disorder - diagnosis
Biological and medical sciences
Cognition Disorders - complications
Humans
Male
Medical sciences
Neuropsychological Tests
Other psychotic disorders
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Projective Techniques
Psychiatric Status Rating Scales
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychomotor Performance
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
Psychoses
Visual Perception
Ability
Case study
Human
Psychosis
Autism
Vision
Cognition
Three dimensional space
Space perception
Developmental disorder
Pictural drawing
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Summary:We report here the case study of a patient (E.C.) with an Asperger syndrome, or autism with quasinormal intelligence, who shows an outstanding ability for three-dimensional drawing of inanimate objects (savant syndrome). An assessment of the subsystems proposed in recent models of object recognition evidenced intact perceptual analysis and identification. The initial (or primal sketch), viewer-centered (or 2-1/2-D). or object-centered (3-D) representations and the recognition and name levels were functional. In contrast. E.C.′s pattern of performance in three different types of tasks converge to suggest an anomaly in the hierarchical organization of the local and global parts of a figure: a local interference effect in incongruent hierarchical visual stimuli, a deficit in relating local parts to global form information in impossible figures, and an absence of feature-grouping in graphic recall. The results are discussed in relation to normal visual perception and to current accounts of the savant syndrome in autism.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Case Study-2
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ISSN:0278-2626
1090-2147
DOI:10.1006/brcg.1993.1060