Letter to the Editors of Autism: The International Journal of Research and Practice

Inverse correlation between the conceptual and perceptual processing in children with autism may be due to processing bias differences in information recall Dear Editors, Lopez et al. (2008) administered a visual semantic memory task and a face recognition task in 15 children with autism and reported an inverse correlation between holistic perceptual processing and semantic information processing. Here I propose that there might be an alternative explanation for such findings. The analysis across tasks likely revealed not only the capacity in using different resources (holistic or semantic) but also the way to correctly recall them, especially for participants with autism who have shown to be more dependent on visual thinking than controls (Kana et al., 2006). For the participants with autism, a sequential processing could be the dominant way to correctly perform recall during the visual semantic memory task, because pictures were presented in a serial order (even though they might have been helped by the semantic information). However, in the face recognition task, which was a two alternative forced choice task, a holistic simultaneous processing is mainly involved: the 500 ms interval in this task was fairly short, making a sequential recall less prominent. These two processing strategies could thus be negatively correlated for the same individual in different tasks, suggesting that an increased use of sequential processing could be associated with reduced use of holistic processing. Furthermore, such an inverse correlation was found only in the autism group, suggesting a relatively limited flexibility in perceptual and conceptual organization in these individuals. The semantic factor can surely modulate processing and facilitate recall, which could lead to different performance between conditions as revealed in this study. Moreover, “central coherence is not a unitary construct”, as the authors point out in their conclusion. Processing bias and cognitive style (Happe, 1999) together with the heterogeneous nature of autism (Tager-Flusberg and Joseph, 2003) and the differences in experimental design across studies (e.g., the presence of emotional / social aspects in the face experiment), may account for the apparently discrepant findings. In sum, I propose that the inverse correlation between processing at a perceptual level and at a conceptual level observed by Lopez et al. (2008) in participants with autism could also be due to processing bias difference in information recall across tasks, which may have a more significant impact on the performance of individuals with autism. Fei CHEN [email protected] Laboratory of Prof. Hadjikhani Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne SV-BMI-GRHAD, Station 15, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

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