I have known about these for years, but I was just reminded of them because I saw some on a website among other puzzles. Here is the "official" droodle page. They are simple line figures that you are supposed to give a meaning to, by using your imagination to interpret the shapes.
Anyway, I was wondering if people's answers to these could be used to differentiate people on the autism spectrum from others. I have noticed that many of the "correct" answers given for these droodles are based on a type of thinking that is very different from how I naturally tend to analyze abstract images.
There often seems to be a bias toward seeing people or animals in the pictures, or objects that are constructed for human- or animal-centric purposes. In some cases, inanimate objects are even personified. Also, the whole idea of the puzzle is to take a geometric pattern and impose a real-world situation onto it (however much you need to stretch the word "real"). In this sense, it is almost opposite of a scientific diagram, where a level of mechanistic or structural abstraction is applied to something that exists in the world. This doesn't mean that I never get the intended answer, just that I often think along quite different lines, and often don't find the "correct" answers as funny as I think the artist wants them to be.
With that in mind, I was wondering if people on the autism spectrum would tend to interpret droodles in a reproducibly different way from the general population. I know I have seen a paper where someone created a movie out of geometric shapes that most people interpreted as a story about people chasing each other around a house, but that many autistic people interpreted in a quite different way.
22 Jul 2008, 2:20 am
