
The notion that people with ASD have a more detail-focused processing style than NTs has become popular not only with researchers but also with teachers, parents, and those with ASD. Kanner’s interest in global–local processing in ASD, and its relationship with insistence on sameness, is reflected in the title of his 1951 paper, “The conception of wholes and parts in early infantile autism.”

If the slightest ingredient is altered or removed, the total situation is no longer the same and therefore is not accepted as such” (Kanner 1943, p.
#Central coherence deficit autism full
The concept of weak coherence is reflected in Kanner’s first reports of autism as involving an “inability to experience wholes without full attention to the constituent parts… A situation, a performance, a sentence is not regarded as complete if it is not made up of exactly the same elements that were present at the time the child was first confronted with it. Together with Amita Shah, she demonstrated that people with ASD were better than IQ-matched comparison groups on the Block Design and Embedded Figures Tests, demonstrating facility in seeing the parts without being distracted by the whole picture. She hypothesized that the drive for coherence was weaker in people with ASD and suggested that this would make them better than neurotypicals (NTs) at some tasks.


Implications for the validity of dynamic assessments for children with autism are discussed.The term “central coherence” was coined by Uta Frith in her influential 1989 book “Autism: Explaining the Enigma.” This drive for coherence, in Frith’s words, “ pulls together large amounts of information” like the tributaries of a river, and “ without this type of high-level cohesion, pieces of information would just remain pieces, be they small pieces or large pieces” (p. All the children showed significant improvements in dynamic assessment test scores after mediation however, among those with below average nonverbal intelligence scores, weak central coherence was significantly associated with smaller gains in performance after teaching. The responses of 52 children with autism (mean age 9:10 years) on a test of central coherence and a dynamic assessment task were analysed. In this study, the relationship between central coherence and more dynamic indicators of learning are investigated. In children with autism this ability is diminished, and the impact of central coherence deficits in children with autism have previously been observed using static measures of learning, such as reading comprehension test performance.

Central coherence refers to an in-built propensity to form meaningful links over a wide range of stimuli and to generalize over as wide a range of contexts as possible.
