I was shown a picture of lots of different activities at a seaside. I was asked describe what was happening in the picture. So I described the individual activities. The fact that I did that instead of describing the larger picture as ‘vacation’ is evidence that im autistic. But those people could have lived at the coast, it might just be a saturday for them … right?
So the mark of not being autistic, is to draw assumptions based on partial evidence? I joke, but also I dont really joke.
I was at a training course for work and they were talking about the difference between big picture thinking and evidence based thinking - as though those two have no crossover. They show us a picture of stone henge and tell us to say what we notice about it. I get picked first: “it looks like the grass has recently been cut”. Everyone laughs, its probably an odd thing to point out. Next person: “its summer solstice”, very good, well done. But is it?? Why? “The sky is red”. Yeah okay, I saw stonehenge and thought summer too, but nothing in the picture shows that. So I looked for evidence of summer - the grass is yellowed, parched? No its only a patch, the rest is quite dark and the stones appear to be damp, the yellow is probably some dead grass from having been cut - yes, the grass is short around the bottom of the stones and there seems to be some grass blades powdered to them, the grass has been cut, there is no evidence of it being solstice. Red sky and damp, its probably dawn.
Back to the test, the theory is that someone with autism cant assess the outer context, or the big picture, in the first instance of thought (<200ms). But actually maybe that is what is happening to me if im dismissing the context as not proven, its coming later in my processing of what I am looking at 🤔 either way, whether the test works or not, those people could just live at the coast 😤
From a lot of what I’ve seen, strong literalism and very little intuition is a pretty common trait with autism. You have a picture with a bunch of people at the beach, we’ll, you have a bunch of people at the beach. The lifeguard isn’t on vacation, some people could be there on a day trip, so why would you say vacation. Take the same picture, add a sign that says “Beachside Resort” and you might be more likely to say vacation.
I think this ties into how people with autism respond to open-ended and closed questions. What’s 2+2? Well, 4, obviously. What’s your favorite color? Shouldn’t be too hard. What’s the best color? Now it gets confusing. If I’m hunting, neon orange is great. If I’m painting the outside of my house, probably not neon orange. I probably want a different color than either of those for my bedroom, my clothes, my car. And now you’ve been staring at the evaluator for 30 seconds like they just asked you the meaning of life and how that is going to direct your goals for the next 20 years, when what a more neurotypical person would say is, “Blue, because it brings out my eyes.”
So if you look at those questions in that context, they may be very helpful for the evaluator to make a diagnosis, simply because there is no obvious answer.