Weak Coherence
Contents
Weak Coherence and ASD
Description
- History
- Theory
Central Coherence refers to a person's ability to understand things in a specific context.The Theory of Weak Coherence as it applies to ASD suggests that people with ASD preferentially use a detail-focused processing style over a more global, integrative processing style that predominates as a person ages. This bias toward detail-focused processing can be seen through open-ended tasks which require strong attention to detail, where the ASD research group participants perform significantly better than the typically developing control group. ASD patients, however, still are able to globally process stimuli as seen in selective attention tasks where participants are explicitly told to pay attention to global information. In particular, one popular way of examining processing style bias in ASD is through facial processing because faces could be processed both featurally or configurally. However,these findings cannot necessarily be generalized to other types of stimuli because of the special significance of faces in processing. 1
Participants with autism appear to be able to integrate the various properties of an object and to process the meaning of individual words, but it is when people with ASD have to integrate words or objects that coherence is weak. Additionally, participants may seem to dispaly global processing when really the result is a chaining effect, where a global view can be created by taking into account only items that can be processed locally.
Criticisms
There have been conflicting or negative findings for some tests for weak coherence in ASD. Some suggest that this may be because of differences in test-question wording; for example, when Scott et. al. asked study participants with ASD whether two lines of an illusion "looked the same length," the participants performed similarly to control groups, but when ASD participants were asked whether two lines "were the same length," they were more accurate than controls. Additionally, certain selective attention tests are particularly sensitive to small variations in methodologies. 1
Another criticism is that most tasks that test for processing assume that local and global processing levels operate antagonistically, such as in the Navon taks and the EFT. There could theoretically be other situations where the two may not necessarily act in competition with each other. 1
Tests for Weak coherence
References
1. The Weak Coherence Account: Detail-focused Cognitive Style in Autism Spectrum Disorders. J Autism Dev Disord. 2006 Jan;36(1):5-25 PMID 16450045