Alastair Smith Foraging field: Children with autism take longer than controls to learn patterns when searching for a light that changes from green to red.

Children with autism do not use efficient, systematic methods to search for an object, according to a study published in January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Children with autism are known to be faster than typically developing children at finding an object hidden in a complex two-dimensional image. This, combined with the tendency of people with autism to have repetitive behavior and an unemotional outlook, has led to the theory that people with autism have a ‘systemizing’ brain — one that overly relies on rule-based logic.

The new study questions this theory by showing that children with autism do not use systematic methods to find an item in a 4-by-4 meter area, which the authors contend models everyday life more closely than a small image does.

The researchers set up 49 lights on a large field, of which 16 were illuminated. They then instructed 20 children with autism and 20 typically developing controls to look for a light that changes color when it is touched. The light’s location changed over the course of the experiment, but was on one side of the field, called the ‘rich’ side, 80 percent of the time.

Children with autism were slower than controls at figuring out this pattern. They were also less likely to follow the most efficient pathway when looking for the light, and were more likely to try the wrong light more than once.

These results suggest that children with autism may have trouble orienting themselves within a large space, suggesting that their enhanced ability to locate objects in images does not translate into their everyday lives.