A cross-task comparison on visuospatial processing in autism spectrum disorders

Lay abstract Visuospatial abilities are cognitive competences crucially involved in our interaction with the environment in numerous daily activities (i.e. recognizing objects, reproducing drawings, and recalling locations). Individuals with autism spectrum disorder often shown peculiarities in the processing of visuospatial material, with a relative advantage in some tasks and difficulties in others. Our study emphasizes the importance to identify strengths and weaknesses in their visuospatial profile. For this reason, our goal was to measure different visuospatial skills in a group of individuals with autism compared with a typically developed group, evaluating the role of the visuospatial intelligence. Participants were asked to quickly recognize figures among other similar ones, recall configurations from memory, mentally integrate segmented stimuli in order to match them with unsegmented figures, and look at a figure and then reconstruct it using blocks. All the tasks presented both figures characterized by local details and global figures, easily to recognize as a whole. Our results revealed similar visuospatial abilities between the two groups in most of the tasks. However, the two groups seem to use different cognitive processes to perform some tasks. Only for the group with autism, the level of visuospatial intelligence had an important role, meaning that different processing strategies were used. The results suggested the need for clinicians and researchers to investigate not only the performance on visuospatial tasks but also the effect of individual's characteristics (i.e. visuospatial intelligence), in order to better understand the processing strategies supporting participants' visuospatial performance.