Autistic imagination sub-traits are unrelated to visual temporal integration or inference

Autistic individuals experience atypical temporal integration, and previous studies have suggested that this atypicality is related to difficulties in imagination. Temporal integration in vision was assessed using slit-viewing tasks that require unifying successive partial views of a moving target into a coherent percept. This task also requires inference ability when the targets are complex, as in line drawings. We hypothesized that imagination difficulties would be more closely related to inference difficulties than to temporal integration difficulties. To test this, we conducted an experiment with 67 Japanese university students using slit-viewing tasks with line drawings, characters, and meaningless shapes, as well as a fill-in-the-blank task involving word inference. The results showed that neither imagination difficulties nor overall autistic traits were associated with performance in any of these tasks. These findings suggest that imagination difficulties and autistic traits may not be related to visual temporal integration or inference abilities.