Fragmented visuospatial processing in children with pervasive developmental disorder.
Kids with PDD-NOS may miss the big picture on complex visuospatial tasks—assess global processing explicitly before assuming detail focus.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team gave kids three visuospatial tasks. They used the Rey Complex Figure Test, the Children's Embedded Figures Test, and a drawing test.
Participants were children with PDD-NOS, Tourette syndrome, and typical development. The study was done in a clinic setting.
What they found
Kids with PDD-NOS copied the Rey figure in pieces. They drew corners and edges separately. Their final picture looked broken apart.
On the hidden-figures task, these kids did not show a detail focus. They saw parts and wholes about the same as the other groups.
How this fits with other research
Cardillo et al. (2022) later saw the same piecemeal style in older ASD youth on the same Rey test. They added that ASD kids lean on short-term memory tricks, while typical kids use big-picture memory.
Edgin et al. (2005) looked similar kids but found no global-local gap. The difference: their sample was older and higher functioning. Task choice and child age decide whether you see the fragment pattern.
Scherf et al. (2008) tracked the same kids into adulthood. The fragmented style never went away. This tells us the gap is stable, not a delay.
Why it matters
Before you label a child as detail-obsessed, test global processing directly. Ask the child to copy a complex figure and watch how they start. If they begin with corners, give them a frame outline first. Teach them to outline the big rectangle before adding windows. This small prompt can save minutes of re-drawing and cut frustration.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Children diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS) and Asperger Syndrome (AS) may be characterised by a similar perceptual focus on details as children with autistic disorder (AD). This was tested by analysing their performance in a visuoperceptual task [the Children's Embedded Figure Test (CEFT)] and a graphic reproduction task [the Rey Complex Figure Task (Rey CFT)]. Control groups were children with Tourette Syndrome (TS) and typically developing children. The TS sample performed similarly to the normal control group in both tasks. The CEFT results did not show the expected preference for local processing in children with PDD-NOS. However, the Rey CFT data revealed that the children with this lesser variant of PDD processed visuospatial information in a fragmented way and were deficient in global processing.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2006 · doi:10.1007/s10803-006-0140-z