When Pulitzer Prize–winning music critic Tim Page was in second grade, he and his classmates went on a field trip to Boston. He later wrote about the experience as a class assignment, and what follows is an excerpt:
“Well, we went to Boston, Massachusetts, through the town of Warrenville, Connecticut, on Route 44A. It was very pretty, and there was a church that reminded me of pictures of Russia from our book that is published by Time-Life. We arrived in Boston at 9:17. At 11 we went on a big tour of Boston on Gray Line 43, made by the Superior Bus Company like School Bus Six, which goes down Hunting Lodge Road where Maria lives and then on to Separatist Road and then to South Eagleville before it comes to our school. We saw lots of good things like the Boston Massacre site. The tour ended at 1:05. Before I knew, it we were going home. We went through Warrenville again, but it was too dark to see much. A few days later it was Easter. We got a cuckoo clock.”
Page received an unsatisfactory grade on his essay. What’s more, his irate teacher scrawled in red across the top of the essay: “See me!” As he recalls in his new memoir Parallel Play (Doubleday, 2009), such incidents were not uncommon in his childhood, and he knew why he was being scolded: “I had noticed the wrong things.”
A Question of Focus
The subtitle of Page’s memoir is Growing Up with Undiagnosed Asperger’s, and indeed Page didn’t learn until age 45 that he suffers from what is called autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. ASD is usually defined by impairments in social interaction and communication, but many people with autism and Asperger’s syndrome (in which symptoms are milder) also tend to fixate on and remember seemingly irrelevant information in their world. Their attention seems to be awry, or to use Page’s words, they notice the wrong things.
But why? What’s going on in the autistic mind that makes the details of bus routes infinitely fascinating? Why are people like Page so easily distracted from the main act? Psychologists at University College London think that it might be a mistake to consider such distractibility as simply a deficit. To the contrary, Anna Remington and John Swettenham and their colleagues speculate that people with ASD might have a greater than normal capacity for perception, so that what appears as irrelevant distraction is really a cognitive bonus. They decided to test the idea in the lab.
Selective Attention
Remington and Swettenham studied a group of people with autism spectrum disorder, most of whom had Asperger’s, along with normal controls. They asked all the subjects to look at a computer screen, which displayed various combinations of letters and dots forming a ring. The subjects were instructed to very rapidly determine if the letters N or X were present in the ring and then hit the corresponding key on the keyboard. Some of the circles—those with more letters—were more difficult to process than others. There were also other letters floating outside the circle, but the subjects were specifically instructed to ignore those letters. Those floating letters were the laboratory equivalent of an irrelevant distraction in the real world.
The psychologists were measuring perceptual capacity—that is why they varied the complexity of the task. As expected, everyone was slower at the task when the ring contained more letters. The researchers were also measuring distractibility. When a letter outside the ring was one of the target letters (N or X), the subjects often took a longer time finding the N or X in the ring—indicating they were distracted by the presence of a target letter in the location that they were supposed to ignore.
The psychologists reasoned that as long as the subjects’ total perceptual capacity was not exhausted, they would also process the irrelevant, distracting letters within their visual field. Once they had surpassed their perceptual capacity—once the ring of letters was sufficiently complex—irrelevant processing would stop. So if ASD subjects in fact have greater processing capacity, then they should process more distracting information even as the main task becomes increasingly complex.
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15 Comments
Add CommentHigh-functioning Asperger’s sufferers are perhaps justifiably being treated by the psycho-pharmaceutical industry as an ailment. Any significant perceptual distinction is detrimental to successful social interactions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, a case can be made that the enormously broad category of Autism Spectrum Disorders includes functional enhancements that may prove essential to the continued survival of the species. The current functional adaptations have not proven to be sustainable. Perhaps society should be careful not to ‘cure’ all distinguished individuals.
Puzzling final paragraph. Since when is remembering landmarks, times and bus route numbers less useful in real-life situations than details of a minor skirmish from 200 years ago? Sounds like these people may actually have a better connection with reality than the scientists studying them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Why are people like Page so easily distracted from the main act?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo we are all clear on what the "main act"....is are we ?
The writer of the article seems to be more focused on normal behavior than on useful behavior. The ability to follow instructions and to mimic the mood and normative functioning of the flock may be a good thing, however the questions one might ask of the autistic functioning is, "Is it useful? Can it contribute? History is full of accounts of odd balls and non-conformists who have changed the course of the development of mankind for the better.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTypical.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis european notion that there is one right way that everyone must be made to think and live, and anyone not in line must be coerced, drugged, treated, or somehow changed to fit it.
Just let people live, dammit.
"Their reaction times indicated that they were still noticing when the extra letter was an N or X, while also finding the target letter in the ring with the same speed and accuracy as the normal controls."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thismaybe i missed something but how does that work?
jochu - I interpreted that statement to indicate that those diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome found the target letters both inside and outside the ring with the same that speed that 'normal' participants found only the target letters within the ring, as directed. They were distracted by the extra targets, but still performed the assigned task just as well as others.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't have any problem with people thinking differently. I do have a problem with people who kill or harm other people and animals. They are the ones that we need to do something about.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPlanes would never fly if someone didn't think differently.
If people with ASD can process distracting information and still perform assigned tasks, why wasn't Tim Page able to recall bus routes and highways AND the history he learned in Boston? After all, that was the assigned task. When I hear a claim that someone can do "more" than normal people, I expect them to do, well, more.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSteve D, as a teacher who now has several students a day on the spectrum, I can tell you that the history was learned, but not specifically solicited. Likely the teacher asked students to "write about what you learned during the field trip", and didn't specifically ask that students write about the historical aspects of their trip. The new buzz word in education is "differentiation", and that's what teacher back-in-the-day were probably not required to do.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"I do have a problem with people who kill or harm other people and animals."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh, you mean like farmers?
It all rather illustrates that the epistemology of Asperger's syndrome is a complete mess. The diagnostic criteria are vague and various character traits keep being tacked on as though to try to make it more determinate as a syndrome, but they only serve to muddy the waters because they are not always consistent -- particularly on the issue of the whole axis of intuition and creativity. Carving up humanity with a system of psychiatric labeling is rather repugnant in any case.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRecommended reading: 'Asperger's is Just a racket': http://racketaspergers.blogspot.com/
Steve D - Asperger's deal very well with concrete concepts but not with abstracts. If the teacher asked specifically about the historical event, writing about it wouldn't have posed a problem. This essay simply showed what Page found noteworthy on that excursion, but the historical event was still mentioned albeit briefly.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Planes would never fly if someone didn't think differently."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPlanes have always flown, we wouldn't have planes if someone didn't think differently
no?
Perhaps specific question could have been answered if he decided to use that information he gathered. Perhaps his opinion of what the most important/interesting thing he learned is different than what he had learned. I think the main point here is that he made a decision to write about that and not the 200 year old history. Who's to say he couldn't answer the same questions as any other student. The only thing shown about ASD is that they do not make the same decisions socially, not that they don't have the ability to do so.
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