An Experimental Study Of Cognitive Style In Children With High-functioning Autism

The superior performance of high-functioning children with autism on the Embedded Figures Test and their "island ability" always attracts researchers' attention. Whether the trait of detail-focused processing is a kind of processing style or a processing deficit arose researchers' debate. Otherwise, most autistic children also have general learning difficulties and low IQ; whether or not this phenomenon indicates that autistic children have a weak cognitive ability? "Weak central coherence" (WCC) and "Executive Dysfunction" explain this question in some aspects, however, autistic children' cognitive style and trait is still a question that need to be researched deeply.This research reviews the internal and external researches focusing on this question, analyzing the high-functioning autistic (HFA) children' cognitive traits and styles by evaluating four cognitive styles, comparing with typically developing controls (TD). Finally, integrating with the experimental results, the author summarizes the comprehensions and applications of the theories about "Weak central coherence" (WCC) and "Executive Dysfunction".These four cognitive styles are (1): Field dependence-independence; (2): Reflectiveness-Impulsivity; (3): Simultaneous-Successive processing (4): Top-Down and Bottom-Top cognitive style. The results indicate as follows:1. For the high-functioning autistic children, their local processing is more excellent than global processing; imagery processing is more excellent than verbal processing. After matching the verbal IQ, HFA'S local processing about figure information is more superior to TD.2. HFA is much more apt to Field independence processing, rather than Field dependence processing. After matching the verbal IQ, HFA performs better than TD on field independence-dependence test.3. With the condition of matching verbal IQ, the Simultaneous-Successive processing ability of HFA is influenced by the difficulty of task. That is, HFA performs weaker than TD on the easy simultaneously processing task, but on the easy auditory Successive processing, they perform better than TD. However, there are not significant differences between HFA and TD on the high difficult Simultaneous-Successive processing task.4. HFA is much more apt to Bottom-Top processing, rather than Top-Down processing. After matching the verbal IQ, HFA performs weaker than TD on the tasks that need integrating Bottom-Top processing and Top-Down processing.