

Although changes to routines may seem minor and unimportant to a neurotypical person, for an autistic person, the feeling that everything is not exactly how they expect it and prefer it to be may provoke extreme anxiety. Weak central coherence, poor joint attention, and low verbal ability contributed significantly and independently to the prediction of autism group membership, a finding consistent with 3. The central coherence involves the processes of perceptual coding and attention mechanisms, highly deficient in children with ADHD (Booth & Happ, 2010). Weak central coherence could help to explain the narrow, specific focus of special interests and adherence to familiar routines in people with autism. This could, for instance, put a student at a disadvantage when trying to assemble information for an essay. One such account, the Weak Central Coherence (WCC) hypothesis of autism, provides a plausible framework for the interpretation of the simultaneous co-occurrence of EV’s particular pattern of cognitive strengths and weaknesses. Conversely, an autistic person may find it hard to work out what a whole object is from drawings of parts, or be unable to arrange apparently random sentences into a coherent story. This kind of visual eye for detail could be very useful in jobs such as quality control on a production line, where picking up subtle flaws in a product is crucial. Can you pick out a shape within the pram figure that exactly matches the separate. In 1989, psychologist Uta Frith gave the term Central coherence to a persons ability to derive overall meaning from a collection of details. Figure 4 Example of the embedded figures test. The weak central coherence hypothesis of Frith is one of the most prominent theories concerning the abnormal performance of individuals with autism on tasks.


The test asks the person to find the matching triangle within the many shapes in the pram drawing. By contrast, weak central coherence refers to the tendency in ASD to attend to and remember details rather than global form or meaning. There is a drawing of a triangle beside the pram. This is a simple line drawing of a pram, with many geometric shapes and lines drawn over it.
