Georgia Tech GVU Technical Report GIT-GVU-10-05 1 Thinking in Pictures as a Cognitive Account of Autism Maithilee Kunda and Ashok K. Goel School of Interactive Computing Georgia Institute of Technology Abstract We analyze the hypothesis that some individuals on the autism spectrum may use visual mental representations and processes to perform certain tasks that typically developing individuals perform verbally. We present a framework for interpreting empirical evidence related to this “Thinking in Pictures” hypothesis and then provide comprehensive reviews of data from several different cognitive tasks, including the n-back task, serial recall, dual task studies, Raven’s Progressive Matrices, semantic processing, false belief tasks, visual search and attention, spatial recall, and visual recall. We also discuss the relationships between the Thinking in Pictures hypothesis and other cognitive theories of autism including Mindblindness, Executive Dysfunction, Weak Central Coherence, and Enhanced Perceptual Functioning. Keywords: Autism; cognition; information processing; mental imagery; verbal representations; visual representations; visual reasoning. Corresponding author:
[email protected] Introduction Numerous individuals on the autism spectrum have posited that they tend to use visual mental representations instead of verbal ones (e.g. Hurlburt, Happé, & Frith, 1994). In her well-known autobiographical book Thinking in Pictures , for example, Temple Grandin (2006) describes how her visual thinking style benefits her work in engineering design but also creates difficulties in understanding abstract concepts. Among cognitive theorists in the autism research community, this “Thinking in Pictures” idea seems to have received limited focused and sustained consideration. This relative lack of attention perhaps is due not only to the introspective nature of the above accounts but also because the hypothesis seems ill-defined.