![]() ![]() After that, you don’t need to pick up any of the blocks again you can just turn them in place until you have all the pieces you need. The truth is that all you need to do (at least for the example in the picture) is turn every block so that it is half red and half white on top. If you aren’t able to focus on just one side of each cube, you can spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to turn them so that the right side is facing up. Another distraction is the fact that the blocks are 3-dimensional objects with 6 sides, but you only need to be concerned with the side facing up.The only difference is in the orientation. Then it’s simple to see that all nine parts are the same thing– a square that’s half white and half red, divided diagonally. As a result, your eyes might be distracted by the diagonal lines in the overall pattern (How do I make those wavy “arrow” patterns?) and have trouble seeing where to make the divisions.Since I know that I’m looking for nine squares, I have no trouble mentally “drawing” those lines onto the pattern on the paper. The picture on the paper doesn’t have any lines separating the pattern into nine squares.I haven’t read Frith’s paper about this, so what follows is just an uneducated guess, but I would suspect that people who focus mostly on the “big picture” would have more trouble with this puzzle for a couple of reasons: I find this sort of puzzle easy and fun, myself. Well, it turns out that on average, people who are on the autism spectrum are able to complete this task faster than people who aren’t. The object is to arrange the nine cubes in a square so that the pattern visible on top matches the pattern on the page. ![]() You have a red and white pattern printed on a piece of paper and nine cubes that are half red and half white, divided diagonally. This is a puzzle that is used as just one part of an IQ test called the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. This is certainly the case in my family– we are all pretty detail oriented! In that sense, this theory may cast too broad a net (whereas others I find too narrow), but I think Frith is definitely still on to something. Frith says that many of these things are true of the relatives of a person with autism, even if they don’t have autism themselves. One comment I have is that I think these traits can be true of anyone who is detail oriented, whether they are autistic or not. The funny thing is that, while the name of this theory of autism refers to a weakness, the most clear evidence of it is seen in a person’s strengths at tasks that depend on being detail oriented.įrith’s video gives several examples of visual tests that seem to indicate that this focus on details is an area of strength in people with autism and Asperger’s. It’s been one of my most helpful sources for this series of posts. ![]() Incidentally, here’s a link to a presentation by Frith on various Cognitive Theories of Autism. She describes weak central coherence as “an information processing style” that tends to process “details at the expense of global meaning.” Put another way, autistic people are very good at noticing details, but we struggle with seeing the “big picture”– we might see every tree but miss the forest. The weak central coherence theory was first advanced by German-born psychologist Uta Frith of University College London in the late 1980s. Okay this is my third post about a specific cognitive theory of autism, a theory that attempts to explain the outward signs of autism as the results of something different about the autistic person’s brain or mind. ![]()
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