Evidence for Thinking in Pictures as a Cognitive Account of Autism

In this work, we evaluate the hypothesis that certain individuals on the autism spectrum exhibit a bias towards using visual instead of verbal mental representations. We first make predictions about how this “Thinking in Pictures ” bias might manifest itself in behavior, and then we examine empirical data from several independent behavioral and neuroimaging studies that bear on these predictions. HYPOTHESIS Many introspective accounts by individuals on the autism spectrum suggest the use of mental representations that are predominantly visual instead of verbal (e.g. Grandin, 2006; Hurlburt et al., 1994). Indeed, Joseph et al. (2002) found greater dissociations in individuals on the autism spectrum than in controls between nonverbal (particularly visual) and verbal abilities. A shallow reading of a “Thinking in Pictures ” hypothesis might predict that an individual who thinks visually would show good performance on visual tasks and poor performance on verbal tasks. However, consider the breakdown of cognitive tasks shown in Figure 1. The bulk of psychological evidence on how humans solve tasks has given us TA and TB, by definition. However, if a typically verbal task (i.e. in TB) happens also to be solvable visually (i.e. lies within A ∩ TB), it is possible that an individual who has trouble using verbal representations may be able to develop a compensatory visual strategy for solving that task