One explanation is that weak coherence is a result of reduced connectivity throughout the brain caused by a lack of synchronization of activities in the brain, lack of connecting fibers, and faulty top down regulation. Additionally, participants may seem to display global processing when really the result is a chaining effect, where a global view can be created by taking into account only items that can be processed locally. Participants with autism appear to be able to integrate the various properties of an object and to process the meaning of individual words, but it is when people with ASD have to integrate words or objects as a whole that coherence is weak. However,these findings cannot necessarily be generalized to other types of stimuli because of the special significance of faces in processing. In particular, one popular way of examining processing style bias in ASD is through facial processing because faces could be processed both featurally or configurally. ASD patients, however, still are able to globally process stimuli as seen in selective attention tasks where participants are explicitly told to pay attention to global information. This bias toward detail-focused processing can be seen through open-ended tasks which require strong attention to detail, where the ASD research group participants perform significantly better than the typically developing control group. The Theory of Weak Coherence as it applies to ASD suggests that people with ASD preferentially use a detail-focused processing style rather than a more global, integrative processing style which normally predominates as a person ages. 2Ĭentral Coherence refers to a person's ability to understand things in a specific context. Another useful way to think of autism is by accepting both Theory of Mind and Weak Coherence as working together to explain ASD in entirety. Some scientists believe that this theory is a more useful framework than the Theory of Mind for explaining the cognitive causes of ASD because it also explains the superior performance of ASD study participants on certain detail oriented tasks as well as the weaker performance on other theory of mind tasks. So the theory began to evolve beyond Frith's original proposition as scientists began to suggest that central coherence characterizes autistic people at all levels of theory of mind ability. As the theory became more well-known, scientists saw that, in contrast to theory of mind false-belief tasks where approximately 20 percent of autistic study participants passed, all autistic participants showed significant task performance differences compared with control groups on tasks designed to test for central coherence. The Weak Central Coherence theory for ASD was first suggested by Uta Frith to explain the results for autistic participants' performance on theory of mind tasks. Brain structures activated in typically developing
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