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posted by martyb on Tuesday August 18 2015, @06:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the whoda-thunk? dept.

ScienceDaily summarizes a new study (paywalled) published a few days ago in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

It is the first study to find a link between autistic traits and the creative thinking processes.

People with high levels of autistic traits are more likely to produce unusually creative ideas, new research confirms. While they found that people with high autistic traits produced fewer responses when generating alternative solutions to a problem - known as 'divergent thinking' - the responses they did produce were more original and creative.

The research...looked at people who may not have a diagnosis of autism but who have high levels of behaviours and thought processes typically associated with the condition. This builds on previous research suggesting there may be advantages to having some traits associated with autism without necessarily meeting criteria for diagnosis.

People with high autistic traits...are typically considered to be more rigid in their thinking, so the fact that the ideas they have are more unusual or rare is surprising. This difference may have positive implications for creative problem solving.

They might not run through things in the same way as someone without these traits would to get the typical ideas, but go directly to less common ones. In other words, the associative or memory-based route to being able to think of different ideas is impaired, whereas the specific ability to produce unusual responses is relatively unimpaired or superior.


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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday August 18 2015, @06:47PM

    by frojack (1554) on Tuesday August 18 2015, @06:47PM (#224545) Journal

    For evaluating problems non autistics search breadth first, pseudoautistics go for depth first.

    I doubt that.
    First, I don't think you can come up with a working definition of breadth and depth that fits this situation.

    Second, TFS itself suggests that this is a product of the autistic "ridged thinking". They come up with far fewer solutions because they refuse to abandon their familiar footholds. Once in a blue moon their familiar foot hold can lead to an unusual (rube goldberg-esq) solution, which the evaluators immediately label as "creative", but which was really simply a series of forced choices due to the refusal to abandon unproductive starting positions.

    Maybe you want to call such refusal to abandon untenable positions "Depth". But its more like desperation.

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  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday August 18 2015, @08:11PM

    by Bot (3902) on Tuesday August 18 2015, @08:11PM (#224581) Journal

    Not abandoning starting positions until all solutions have been found is depth-first, indeed it becomes desperate when the starting position is not abandoned after realizing you have no more possibilities to test, but that's for people who go full autistic, I guess.

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