Autism: cognitive deficit or cognitive style?

Autism is a developmental disorder characterized by impaired social and communicative development, and restricted interests and activities. This article will argue that we can discover more about developmental disorders such as autism through demonstrations of task success than through examples of task failure. Even in exploring and explaining what people with autism find difficult, such as social interaction, demonstration of competence on contrasting tasks has been crucial to defining the nature of the specific deficit. Deficit accounts of autism cannot explain, however, the assets seen in this disorder; for example, savant skills in maths, music and drawing, and islets of ability in visuospatial tests and rote memory. An alternative account, reviewed here, suggests that autism is characterized by a cognitive style biased towards local rather than global information processing - termed 'weak central coherence'. Evidence that weak coherence might also characterize the relatives of people with autism, and form part of the extended phenotype of this largely genetic disorder, is discussed. This review concludes by considering some outstanding questions concerning the specific cognitive mechanism for coherence and the neural basis of individual differences in this aspect of information processing.