The list seems rather quiet lately. Have people not finished unwrapping their presents?
For those who have, I have a new and unusual result for contemplation, one which unaccountably seems not to have drawn media attention. A research team (Ashwin et al, 2009) at the University of Cambridge, which includes the well-known Simon Baron-Cohen (and not just because he’s Sacha’s cousin) reports that autistic individuals may have exceptional visual acuity. How good is it? Well, they found that a group of autistic subjects had visual acuity of 20:7, which means that they were able to see detail at 20 feet for which a person with average visual ability would have to move as close as 7 feet in order to see. How good is that? Well, the researchers point out that this degree of acuity approaches that of birds of prey (and you don’t get much better than that). It’s also remarkable how consistent their finding was. As their Figure 2 shows, the acuity of every one of their 15 autistic subjects exceeded that of the 15 control subjects (who themselves scored at the high end of normal in terms of acuity). There was no overlap. Of course, not all autistic individuals may turn out to have super-vision. The subjects were high-functioning autistic or Asperger adults of normal IQ, obtained from a database of professionally-diagnosed cases. The finding is also not entirely unexpected. Going as far back as Kanner, who first recognized the disorder, there have been suggestions that autistic individuals may have unusually sensitive sensory or perceptual systems. But this study appears to be the best-documented of such claims. It raises an interesting question: what is the relation, if any, of this heightened visual acuity to the symptoms and etiology of autism? Source: Ashwin, E. et al (2009). Eagle-eyed visual acuity: an experimental investigation of enhanced perception in autism. Biological Psychiatry, 65, 17-21 [available on-line at http://www.autismresearchcentre.com/pubs/results.asp Stephen Stephen L. Black Bishop’s University --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
