Autism is defined as a severe developmental disorder characterized by severe deficits in social, communicative, and speech functions and stereotypical interests and behavior patterns. Currently, autism is viewed as a biologically determined chronic developmental disorder that manifests itself in the early years of a child’s life. It has been suggested that children with autism show a general deficit of cognitive skills in multilevel planning and in the regulation of behavior. These regulation and control processes provide practical solutions to mental problems. These functions allow for the blocking of maladaptive behaviors, meaningful actions, continuous maintenance of the task process, self-control, feedback, and smooth transitions from one task to another.
One of the best-known cognitive concepts of autism is U. Frith. The basis for its creation was the results of experimental studies and observations that found reduced abilities and specific abilities in patients with autism. Such unusual abilities include, for example, high scores in remembering words not related by meaning, the ability to reproduce meaningless sound combinations, the ability to recognize inverted and noisy images, to highlight secondary features in the classification of faces (Price, 2022). At the same time, autistic patients have difficulty with sentence memorization tests, sort of faces by emotional expression, recognition of correctly oriented images, etc. Considering that both high scores in performing specific tests and difficulty in performing others result from a single cause, U. Frith has suggested that one particular imbalance in information integration characterizes autism.
It has been suggested that autistic individuals tend to process information by analyzing elements and details without trying to make a general picture. This assumption is supported by the fact that individuals with autism perform well on tasks that require, above all, concentration on individual details of the presented stimuli rather than on the overall pattern or composition (Price, 2022). For example, the relative advantage of individuals with autism on the inclusive figure detection test may be that they are characterized by spontaneous mental segmentation of the composition into unrelated and meaningless fragments. This segmentation appears to facilitate their identification of the figure included in the drawing, which allows them to achieve high scores in this test. It is unlikely that a single cognitive device can explain all of the cognitive deficits present in autism. Instead, multiple mental skill deficits can help explain why autism exists in so many different forms and varies so much in its severity.
Reference
Price, D. (2022). Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity. Harmony.