Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, repetitive behaviours, restricted interests, and sensory processing issues.
The weak central coherence theory attempts to explain how some autistic people can show remarkable ability in subjects like mathematics and engineering, yet have trouble with language skills and tend to live in an isolated social world.
[citation needed] Since the 1990s, this theory has been a topic in many studies in which the central coherence skills of autistic individuals are compared to those of control samples.
"[5]Laurent Mottron, Jacob A. Burack, Johannes E. A. Stauder and Philippe Robaey (1999) conclude that: "Contrary to expectations based on the central coherence and hierarchisation deficit theories, [our] findings indicate intact holistic processing among persons with autism.
"[8]Natasja van Lang gives the following explanation for these contradictory results: "Results in which central coherence skills are measured with perceptual or verbal-semantic tasks revealed that autistic individuals have a tendency for fragmented perception (Jarrold & Russell, 1997; Happé, 1996), and that they benefit less from the context of meaning in sentences, narratives and memory tests (Happé, 1994b; Jolliffe & Baron-Cohen, 1999).