Minimally verbal children with autism may see the global, but point local: A behavioral and eye-tracking study in visual perceptual processing

Abstract

Recent work suggests that pointing based assessments may underestimate or mischaracterize perceptual and cognitive abilities in minimally verbal autism (mvASD). Extending this line of work, we address the classic global local question by testing whether mvASD children access global visual structure and whether it is consistently expressed in behavior using Kanizsa illusory contours (KIC) and circular colinear contours (CC). Typically developing (TD) and mvASD children viewed KIC and CC stimuli on a touchscreen while spontaneous eye gaze and pointing were recorded. Participants also completed a goal directed drag and drop matching task that required selecting the solid shape corresponding to the global KIC configuration. In spontaneous responses, mvASD children were more drawn to local elements (e.g., individual inducers, the CC frame, single Gabors) and showed less centralized responding than TD peers. Notably, CC pointing was often anchored to one half of the contour regardless of contour screen location, suggesting object centered global selection. Also, in the drag and drop task, approx. 90% of mvASD participants performed above chance in at least one condition and half performed at ceiling, demonstrating accurate global matching. These findings suggest that global structure is available in mvASD but may be underweighted in spontaneous response selection under ambiguity, consistent with the Affordance Competition Hypothesis and ambiguity resolution accounts. Lay SummaryAutism research often asks whether autistic people can see the wood for the trees--integrate parts into a coherent whole. This is difficult to test in minimally verbal autism because many standard tasks rely on a single pointing response that may not reflect what a child actually perceives. In our study, children viewed visual illusions in which a clear shape seems to appear even though it is not actually drawn, for example, a triangle you see because several Pac Man shapes are arranged in just the right way, while we measured both where they looked and where they touched the screen. Minimally verbal autistic children were often more drawn to the smaller parts than typically developing peers, yet when a simple drag and drop game required an explicit choice of the overall shape, most selected the correct global shape. Together, the findings suggest that global structure can be available in mvASD, but its expression in spontaneous behavior may be more context dependent under uncertainty, highlighting the value of using more than one way to measure ability.