Autism Research journal: Autistic people surpass ordinary persons in mental imagination ability 

Researchers from the University of Toulouse (France) have found that people with autistic spectrum disorders often have special qualities of mental imagination. The respective study was published in the scientific journal Autism Research.

Previous research has suggested that autistic people often perceive the world differently and may have better perceptual abilities, which has led to the theory that many of their abilities may exceed those of ordinary people.

The research team collected 44 adults (ages 18-50) with autism spectrum disorder, as well as 42 people without the disorder. They were asked to assess four different stages of mental imagery: generation of imagery, support of visual images, scanning of images, and mental rotation.

In the image generation task, participants were instructed to mentally create a letter on a grid and decide whether it passed through a certain point. Both autistics and ordinary people showed similar results in terms of response accuracy and time, which means that there are no considerable differences in this aspect of mental imagery.

But the visual pattern test, which assessed the ability to store visual patterns in short-term memory, revealed a significant difference. The participants were briefly shown a matrix where some parts were painted black, and then they were asked to restore the image from memory. Volunteers with autism performed better, meaning they have a more developed ability to retain mental images than their neurotypical counterparts.

The scanning test required the participants to check the mental images and decide whether the arrow was pointing to the previously seen point. Participants with autism completed the task much faster.

And in the mental rotation task, which involved the mental manipulation of geometric figures, both groups showed similar results.

According to the researchers, the results obtained by them prove the superior abilities of mental imagination of people with autism compared to their neurotypical peers.