Current cognitive accounts of ASD have focused primarily on the areas of impairment, proposing as explanations deficits in “theory of mind,” executive functions, and so forth. The Sentence Completion Task was found to be a useful test instrument, capable of tapping local processing bias in a range of populations.Īutism and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are characterized not only by social and communicative deficits but also by restricted interests and activities and an uneven profile of cognitive abilities in which remarkable talents in certain visuospatial and memory tasks are notable (e.g., Jolliffe & Baron-Cohen, 1997 Shah & Frith, 1983, 1993). The results suggest that the Sentence Completion Task can reveal individual differences in cognitive style unrelated to IQ in typical development, that most (but not all) people with ASD show weak coherence on this task, and that performance is not related to inhibitory control. We report results from three studies assessing (a) 176 typically developing (TD) 8- to 25-year-olds, (b) individuals with ASD and matched controls, and (c) matched groups with ASD or attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

We present a brief and easy-to-administer test of coherence requiring global sentence completions. Little research has examined whether individual differences in this cognitive style can be found in typical development, independent of intelligence, and how local processing relates to executive control. A local processing bias, referred to as “weak central coherence,” has been postulated to underlie key aspects of autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Theory of weak central coherence