embedded figures test autism spectrum disorder

Such discrepancies also appear when investigating the cognitive profile of neurotypical individuals in relation to their number of autistic traits.Īutistic traits exist across the general population, with autism at the extreme end of a quantitative distribution 7, 8. Among the visuospatial tasks most expected to reveal differences between autistic and neurotypical people are figure disembedding and mental rotation, although there are conflicting results due to methodological differences across the studies 6. The issue of whether visuospatial abilities are superior in autistic people compared to neurotypical people has been debated for several decades 1, 2, 3 and continues to attract the attention of researchers 4, 5. These results are interpreted in terms of the hyper-systemizing theory of autism and contribute to the evidence of individual differences in the cognitive style of autistic people and neurotypical people with autistic traits. A small positive correlation between figure disembedding and social traits was observed in the overall sample. Instead, below this value, sex differences depended on the social traits, with men on average outperforming women at middle-to-high social traits, and with a comparable performance, and with women on average outperforming men, at lower social traits. When non-social traits were above the mean (+ 1 SD), no sex differences in mental rotation were found. Mental rotation was affected by a significant interaction between sex, social and non-social traits. AQ social skills (AQ-social) and attention-to-details (AQ-attention) subscales were used as measures of social and non-social autistic traits, respectively. University students (N = 426) completed the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ), figure disembedding and mental rotation of two-dimensional figures tasks.

In the present study, we investigated whether specific visuospatial abilities, such as figure disembedding and mental rotation, are differently related to social and non-social autistic traits, in neurotypical women and men. Recent data has revealed dissociations between social and non-social skills in both autistic and neurotypical populations.

Embedded figures test autism spectrum disorder