These findings are consistent with other reports of superior performance in detecting embedded figures (Jolliffe & Baron-Cohen, 1997; Shah & Frith, 1983), but typical performance in global and configural processing (Mottron, Burack et al., 1999; Ozonoff et al., 1994) among persons with high-functioning autism. Thus, the notions of local bias and global impairment that are part of WCC may need to be reexamined.

Superior perception, peaks of ability, and savant skills are often observed in the autistic phenotype. The enhanced perceptual functioning model (Mottron et al., 2006a) emphasizes the increased role and autonomy of perceptual information processing in autistic cognition. Autistic abilities also involve enhanced pattern detection, which may develop through veridical mapping across isomorphic perceptual and non-perceptual structures (Mottron et al., 2009). In this paper, we elaborate veridical mapping as a specific mechanism which can explain the higher incidence of savant abilities, as well as other related phenomena, in autism. We contend that savant abilities such as hyperlexia, but also absolute pitch and synaesthesia, involve similar neurocognitive components, share the same structure and developmental course, and represent related ways by which the perceptual brain deals with objective structures under different conditions. Plausibly, these apparently different phenomena develop through a veridical mapping mechanism whereby perceptual information is coupled with homological data drawn from within or across isomorphic structures. The atypical neural connectivity characteristic of autism is consistent with a developmental predisposition to veridical mapping and the resulting high prevalence of savant abilities, absolute pitch, and synaesthesia in autism.

Current research indicates that human gaze direction is a special cue for shifting attention for one of two reasons: (1) it reflects social desires and intentions and (2) its basic perceptual features usually correspond to important events in the environment. This study, conducted with individuals with autism and with age-and IQ-matched typically developing individuals, dissociates these two often-confounded explanations and demonstrates that eyes appear to be special for typically developing individuals because of their social power, whereas gaze effects are mediated by feature correspondence among persons with autism. Why do we have a tendency to shift our attention to where other people are looking? Investigations suggest that there are two possible explanations. One is that eye direction conveys key social information, such as status, personal interest, and attentional engagement [2]. We call this the social reading hypothesis. The other is that people are sensitive to changes in the basic stimulus features that are associated with shifts in gaze direction, in particular, the correspondence between the location of an interesting event in the environment and the position of the pupils/irises in the eyes that are directed towards that location [6,13]. We call this the feature correspondence hypothesis.In the past, these two conceptualizations were tied so closely to one another that they were often discussed as though they were synonymous, as it is difficult to imagine a natural situation in which the social meaning associated with gaze direction and the perceptual features associated with gaze direction could be disentangled [5]. In the present study, we show that the two indeed can be dissociated, a finding that carries substantial implications for the understanding of human social cognition.We examined the performance of a total of 47 participants (see Table 1), who viewed static displays of left-and right-deviated gaze on a computer screen. The participants were asked to make a speeded keypress response when they detected a target occurring to the left or right of the face following one of four gaze cue-target delay intervals (see Fig. 1). Both high functioning individuals with autism (HFA) and typically developing peers (TD) were assigned randomly to either the nonpredictive gaze condition or the predictive gaze condition. In the nonpredictive condition, a target appeared at the gazed-at location 50% of the time and 0926-6410/$ -see front matter D

Persons with Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) display atypical perceptual processing in visual and auditory tasks. In vision, Bertone, Mottron, Jelenic, and Faubert (2005) found that enhanced and diminished visual processing is linked to the level of neural complexity required to process stimuli, as proposed in the neural complexity hypothesis. Based on these findings, Samson, Mottron, Jemel, Belin, and Ciocca (2006) proposed to extend the neural complexity hypothesis to the auditory modality. They hypothesized that persons with ASD should display enhanced performance for simple tones that are processed in primary auditory cortical regions, but diminished performance for complex tones that require additional processing in associative auditory regions, in comparison to typically developing individuals. To assess this hypothesis, we designed four auditory discrimination experiments targeting pitch, non-vocal and vocal timbre, and loudness. Stimuli consisted of spectro-temporally simple and complex tones. The participants were adolescents and young adults with autism, Asperger syndrome, and typical developmental histories, all with IQs in the normal range. Consistent with the neural complexity hypothesis and enhanced perceptual functioning model of ASD (Mottron, Dawson, Soulières, Hubert, & Burack, 2006), the participants with autism, but not with Asperger syndrome, displayed enhanced pitch discrimination for simple tones. However, no discrimination-thresholds differences were found between the participants with ASD and the typically developing persons across spectrally and temporally complex conditions. These findings indicate that enhanced pure-tone pitch discrimination may be a cognitive correlate of speech-delay among persons with ASD. However, auditory discrimination among this group does not appear to be directly contingent on the spectro-temporal complexity of the stimuli.