REY-OSTERRIETH COMPLEX FIGURE PERFORMANCE IN HIGH-FUNCTIONING CHILDREN WITH ASD: DISTINCTIONS FROM TYPICALLY DEVELOPING AND CLINICAL CONTROL GROUPS?

Background: Children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are reported to show a cognitive bias toward a detail-oriented processing style. Deficits in some executive processes are also found. A widely used neuropsychological measure, the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure Test (ROCF), provides a novel and complex stimulus figure by which to investigate the effects of organizational strategies and processing style during the encoding phase on subsequent recall. There are few published studies to examine ROCF performance specifically in children with ASD, and, of those, limitations include sample size and characteristics, comparison groups, and methodology.

Objectives: This study seeks to examine the ROCF performance of children with ASD with comparisons to typically developing children and other clinical groups (children with TS, OCD, and/or ADHD). These clinical groups were selected because of overlap in symptom expression as well as reported presence of EF dysfunctions.

Methods: The ROCF was administered to 34 high functioning children with ASD, 30 typically developing children, and 52 children with TS, OCD, and/or ADHD between the ages of 8 and 14 years of age. The Developmental Scoring System (Bernstein & Waber, 1996) was used as it provides normative scores for this age group along four parameters of performance: organization, style, errors, and recall.

Results: We are conducting a detailed quantitative analysis of performance to examine differences in processing style, visuospatial planning/organization, and figure distortion both within the ASD group and relative to typical and clinical comparison groups. The differential impact of each of these factors on immediate and later recall is being analyzed.

Conclusions: The results of this study are expected to provide a picture of how children with ASD respond to novel and complex information, in a way that distinguishes them from typically developing children and other clinical groups.