I have been slowly building up a picture in my mind of what I find the most interesting aspects of autism from a research point of view. For example, the relative insensitivity to some visual illusions (autism makes you more likely to see things as they are) I find interesting. I don’t find interesting the old stuff about poor social skills (now considered to be at best a great oversimplification).
If autism leads to different perception, then it can hardly be surprising that many other higher level behaviours that rely on perception are also different.
I like the idea that autism leads to different, more intense and focussed attention. This idea is called monotropism. However, a lot of my work in visual perception led me to drop the idea of attention as explanatory – especially as a process where the observer, the self, chooses what to look at. So, although saying that people with autism experience stronger attention is quite correct (they report this), it has to be understood as a shorthand for something more fundamental. I see the term attention as useful because it is descriptive and phenomenological but that usefulness is limited because it is not explanatory.
The thing I’m trying to think about comes to a head with the simple question “Why does a person with autism attend so much more closely?”. This makes it sounds like they are doing something different whereas I’d hope for an understanding that something different is happening to them.
The concept of perception is profoundly difficult. The way we experience it cannot be the way it happens. I look around and am aware of no time lag between what happens out there and what I experience in here. It feels as if my perception is both instantaneous and also fully detailed. It can’t be. That immediacy is just a story the brain tells about what is happening. A story that it elaborates as more information comes in.
For where my thinking about autism is going, there are two big aspects of visual perception as-it-actually-happens that I need to put in place. So here we go.
Coarse to fine scale processing