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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: 4, Interesting) by gman003 on Tuesday August 18 2015, @09:19PM

    by gman003 (4155) on Tuesday August 18 2015, @09:19PM (#224597)

    Speaking as someone diagnosed with Aspergers:
    I don't think people on the autistic spectrum search depth-first. That would be just ridiculously inefficient, and wouldn't be usable in day-to-day life.

    What it might come down to is subconscious filtering. Everyone's brain filters out some solutions before even bringing it to conscious attention (or perhaps it could be said that it doesn't even appear in the solution space the conscious brain searches). Autism-spectrum people may simply have less prefiltering (not none - just less, or maybe even just a different prefilter).

    I know I can certainly come up with rather unconventional solutions to problems. However, much of the time, those solutions are discarded. I also know I have somewhat of a blind spot for solutions that involve other people, although now that I've learned of that blind spot, I can compensate with conscious effort.

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