Renowned Cattle Chute designer and author of "Thinking In Pictures", Temple Grandin, is well known for her presumption that 'Autistics Think in Pictures' and felt this was such a unique way of thinking she described being An Anthropologist On Mars. She had presumed that most non-autistic people, by contrast thought verbally, or in words. In fact most of the GENERAL population are now known to be predominantly visual thinkers, with another 30% thought to be predominantly verbal thinkers.
In fact, teachers knew for a long time that thinking styles were far more diverse than this and today we know that among the rarer minorities in social there are those who are predominantly kinesthetic thinkers (think in movement, spatially, and are physical, hands on learners who have to DO to think), aural/musical thinkers (who learn through rote, rhythms and aural patterns), logical/mathematical thinkers (who learn via systems, categories and links) as well as a handful of other types.
If Visual Thinking is what 60% of the general population do, and verbal thinking is what another 30% of the general population do, how might people at the more learning disabled autistic end of the spectrum think?
Could it be that many do not think in pictures at all, not by a long shot and many may not actually be able to? If so may this group be deprived of what could work for them and their intelligence wrongly judged by the inability to link visual images with words so common in the IQ tests used to judge their potential?
Temple Grandin believed that it was her visual thinking which was responsible for her needing speech therapy for poor articulation at age 2 (she could say 'bah' but not 'ball') and eventual late speech at age 3. Whilst late speakers exist in the general population, there are many people with autism who not only remain non-verbal at age 4 and beyond, but also others who may spend their entire lives with 'dysfunctional' speech. Like many people with Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD) and Language Processing Disorder, many of these people have significant problems getting even the literal meaning of receptive speech in any consistent or ongoing way and can be anywhere from completely functionally 'meaning deaf' to, at best, getting the literal meaning of 50-70% of incoming auditory information. This group may have more going on in their language development than the articulation problems of Oral Dyspraxia. Their ability to link auditory information to any ability to think in pictures may sometimes be severely missing - the words fall meaningless.
As an autism consultant with over 12 years experience working with over 600 people on the autism spectrum, I found those who have not only moderate to severe receptive language processing problems, but also no interest in reading or could read fluently but with no capacity to demonstrate comprehension. Perhaps some had given up because it was a sound making exercise without any fluent meaning or were proud of their sound making exercise and it's patterns regardless of the lack of interpretive meaning.The written word also may not have made pictures happen.
Many such folks cannot relate pictures to text, the pictures, especially complex pictures, can be more or less as meaningless a bunch of patterns as the print or incoming words. Not everybody can respond to picture communication and some merely see the cards as something to flap, chew or flick which happens to have a bunch of colour and form on it and with PECS (Picture Exchange Communication System) there are some folks who simply see a bunch of sticks colliding on a piece of card. None of this should lead to a presumption about their intelligence and even those who struggle to RECEPTIVELY read with meaning may nevertheless learn to type EXPRESSIVELY with meaning.
Some folks, even when shown pictures with words associated with them, can memorise these but not relate the 2D image to an experiencable movable, smellable, tap-able, mouthable object in their 3D world. In other words, if you're kinesthetic and meaning blind, if it don't move then it don't mean nothing.
Some folks have such severe visual perceptual fragmentation and such poor visual tracking, they don't even see whole objects and see the part so at the expense of the whole they are essentially context blind. So the development of the ability to think in pictures (as opposed to fragments) is "like colour to the blind".
When I was 7 years old I got a doll's house for Christmas. I saw a big red angular object with corrugated ridges. I picked it up with the top ridge in my mouth and played the ridges as a musical instrument quite happy with my found toy (for these were never 'given' only left, for to try to give something to me guaranteed it would be seen as an attempt at social invasion and then customarily ignored- see Exposure Anxiety). I later moved onto the series of flattened white blocks, disassembled them from the structure and tapped at them as one does on a door before stacking them in piles according to size. No thinking in pictures. I saw no doll's house.
The cat was a leg, an ear, a tail, an experience of pattability and a noise with associated movement, but no whole cat.
At the age of nine my language was TV commercials and jingles and my own made up words (see Autism And Sensing; The Unlost Instinct for info on speaking in pattern, theme and feel, for those who have not grasped even literal interpretive language).
I could read fluently with no meaning and I had about 10% literal meaning from incoming language. I was tested for deafness (again) but could hear fine. There were no few links between words and concepts. Showing me pictures couldn't help. They were fragmented and flat and I couldn't get acoustics out of them, texture, make them bounce back, see them working somehow as experiences so I got bored quickly at these flat patterns (unless it was an entire book of pictures of categories of cats, or an entire book of pictures of categories of cows) which were meant to get through to my thick skull. As an adult, I got dietary intervention and tinted lenses so I could finally see as a whole. But now my brain could not understand much of what I saw.
Finally, I learned to use gesture to pull meaning out of singular pictures in a word dictionary. By gesturally signing the form or the object, how it would bounce back when prodded had it been three dimensional, how my body would lay on it or move over it, how my hand would slide over it, how it would smell if smelled, I linked the words to experiences and I started on the road to functional interpretive language. By the age of 20 my receptive literal comprehension was a whopping 50% (whilst miming everything other said and trying to work out what I'd have meant had I said it), still losing every second word entirely and often being sentences behind. By the age of 30 it was 70% and under good circumstances has stayed there (it can slip back to 10% if the language is too fast, too many speakers, no gestural signing, no ability to use objects to hold onto the experiential meaning of words, background noise being taken as a competing conversation etc).
The other day I visited a friend. I asked for a toothpick. She put a container of them on the table. I saw a tap-able clear cylinder with a dome on top with a small hole in it. Inside were long thin pieces of pointy ended wood. I saw no toothpicks. Intrigued by this strange object on the table, I shook the container to hear the wooden sticks rattle. As the pointed thin sticks moved, I remarked, excitedly, 'toothpicks' and took one out. The world is truly a remarkable place when you DON'T think in pictures.
I don't use usual symbolic signing, which requires interpretation. I use gestural signing, so its like thinking in movement, in experiences. Though my father used much communication via objects, I wish my environment had gestural signing as well (not taught it to me, for that would have provoked avoidance, but simply used it) when I was a child. At a conference recently, a man diagnosed with 'high functioning autism' remarked, you use signing. I said, 'yes'. He said, 'that's not very autistic'.
I said, 'I don't care what's autistic or not. I care what works'.