An article in Science News yesterday that described work by two different studies that offered new information about autism.
Kinga Morsanyi of the UK and Keith Holyoak of L.A. report in a not yet published paper in Developmental Science that autistic children can think analogically, able to compare and recognize relationships when presented in a visual format.
“Our findings indicate that the basic ability to reason analogically is intact in autism,” notes Morsanyi
The article notes that in this study of 23 children with autism none had larger than normal brains. Psychologist Uta Frith, noting that approximately one fourth of autistic children have large brains, suggests that among this group a compulsive attention to detail makes for compromised analogic thinking, visual or verbal.
This single article suggests several issues. First, are analogical proclivities related to brain size? Second, to what degree is symbolic thinking among the autistic inhibited in the areas that information is perceived, processed or communicated? Perhaps the autistic are mostly compromised by a auditory or language derived information, than content that is visually provided. Third, if larger brained autistic can be clearly defined by features different that non larger brained autistic, maybe different etiologies can be teased out by the different assortment of clues.
