Broader autistic phenotype describes individuals with autistic-like characteristics including social and communicative difficulties. It has been related to ‘weak central coherence’, a failure to integrate local details into a global percept (Happe et al., 2001).

This study related autistic-like traits (measured by the Autism Quotient questionnaire) to perceptions of ambiguous stimuli. The stimuli depicted two same-coloured balls, the first passing over the (stationary) second ball in the ambiguous launch/pass baseline condition. In the experimental conditions, either a visual or auditory disambiguating cue presented at the point of the balls’ spatial coincidence generally elicited a launch percept.

The idea here was that weak central coherence would manifest in high AQ scorers as insensitivity to these contextual cues, such that they would not disambiguate the stimuli to the same degree as seen with low scorers.

In the absence of cues, high AQ scorers (N>10) perceived the ambiguous stimuli as causal more frequently than did the low-scoring group (N>10). However, in the cues’ presence this pattern was reversed.

Weak central coherence has historically been positioned as a cognitive explanation for superiorities and deficits in autism, whereas here its origin would appear to be perceptual in nature, and possibly related to social behaviour difficulties.