Visual mental imagery abilities in autism.
Autism Res
; 2024 Jul 11.
Article
en En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-38993038
In autistic individuals, the role, performance, and autonomy of perceptual functioning are atypical. Overlapping underlying mechanisms of perception and mental imagery predict that the mental imagery abilities of autistic individuals should differ from those of nonautistic individuals. While enhanced abilities to manipulate mental images have been demonstrated in autism, the other stages of mental imagery (generation, maintenance, inspection) remain to be explored. Fortyfour autistic adults and 42 typical participants performed four tasks to assess different stages of mental imagery the Image generation task (mentally generating a letter on a grid and indicating whether it passes over a probe located in the grid), the Visual pattern test (maintaining visual patterns in memory), the Image scanning test (inspecting mental images) and the Mental rotation test (mentally manipulating representations of geometric figures). In the image generation task and the mental rotation test, autistic and typical individuals performed equivalently, both in accuracy and response time. The span observed in the visual pattern test was significantly higher in the autistic group, indicating better maintenance of mental images. In the image scanning test, response times were influenced by the distance to mentally inspect in the typical group but not in the autistic group. Autistic participants were equally fast regardless of distance to inspect. Preserved, greater or differently influenced visual mental imagery abilities are in line with an atypical perceptual functioning in autism, possibly reflecting an increased weight of perceptionbased information relatively to the topdown effect of knowledge and languagebased influence.
Texto completo:
1
Colección:
01-internacional
Base de datos:
MEDLINE
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Autism Res
Asunto de la revista:
PSIQUIATRIA
/
TRANSTORNOS MENTAIS
Año:
2024
Tipo del documento:
Article
País de afiliación:
Francia