Children with a diagnosis of autism and typically developing children were given two
variations of the Navon task (Navon, 1977), which required responding to a target that could
appear at the global level, the local level, or both levels. In one variation, the divided
attention task, no information was given to children regarding the level at which a target
would appear on any one trial. In the other, the selective attention task, children were
instructed to attend to either the local or the global level. Typically developing children made
most errors when the target appeared at the local level whereas children with autism made
more errors when the target appeared at the global level in the divided attention task. Both
groups of children were quicker to respond to the global target than the local target in the
selective attention task. The presence of normal global processing in the children with autism
in one task but not in the other is discussed in terms of a deficit in mechanisms that inhibit
local information in the absence of overt priming or voluntary selective attention to local
information.