In a visual pattern test, autistic participants demonstrated a significantly higher span, indicating superior ability to maintain and reproduce complex visual patterns from short-term memory compared to neurotypical controls1. This enhanced capacity for visual pattern maintenance aligns with previous research suggesting that autistic individuals often perceive the world differently and may have enhanced perceptual abilities1. The finding highlights a specific cognitive strength in autism that could have implications for various tasks requiring visual working memory and pattern recognition.

When mentally inspecting images, autistic participants exhibited a unique ability to scan mental representations with consistent speed, regardless of the distance to be inspected. In contrast, neurotypical individuals' response times varied depending on the distance1. This finding suggests that autistic adults may process mental images more holistically, potentially allowing for faster and more efficient analysis of complex visual information in their mind's eye. The consistent scanning speed could be advantageous in tasks requiring rapid visual processing or detailed mental visualization.

The superior performance in mental imagery tasks aligns with research showing enhanced perceptual abilities in autism. Autistic individuals may have more precise and less context-dependent mental representations, which could contribute to their unique cognitive strengths1. This enhanced perceptual processing is thought to result from atypical neural connectivity and activity across brain regions involved in sensory processing, memory formation, and imagination2. The ability to form detailed mental images may be linked to the hyper- or hyporeactivity to sensory input often observed in autism, suggesting a potential overlap in the underlying neural mechanisms23.

While group-level differences in mental imagery abilities have been observed, significant variation exists among autistic individuals. Some may experience exceptionally vivid imagery, while others may have aphantasia, a condition characterized by the inability to form mental images1. These enhanced mental imagery abilities in autism can contribute to strengths in visual thinking, problem-solving, memory for visual details, creative visualization, and spatial reasoning23. However, further research is needed to fully understand the relationship between autism and mental imagery across the spectrum, as the complexity of the protocols used in studies often requires participants to have average or above-average intellectual functioning, which may not capture the entire autism spectrum2.