The last cognitive characteristic I’d like to talk about is central coherence. Central coherence is simply the ability to take clues that you find and form a higher meaning. So there’s a trunk, there’s some twigs, there’s a branch, there’s some leaves — “Oh, it must be a tree.”
Children with autism may look at that leaf and see every vein on that leaf much, much more in depth than we may ever see, but seeing where that leaf fits in the whole tree may be difficult for them. Now there is a little controversy about central coherence. Some people believe that children with autism have central coherence, but you have to tell them to use it.
For instance, if I gave you a worksheet with words that sound the same but mean differently according to context — if I say, “Okay, just fill in the right word in the sentence,” they may not do as well than if I say, “I’d like to look — you to look at the sentences very carefully, and from what the sentence says pick out the right word that goes in that sentence.”
So sometimes they have a lot of knowledge and a lot of abilities, but they aren’t really sure when to use those knowledge and abilities. As it looks on the surface, without going deeper, children with autism have a terrible time with main topic, with summarization where you have to take out those important details, leave those unimportant details alone, all of those things that make you form a bigger whole. Because from their perspective they’re usually only seeing those little parts of things rather than the big picture.
