Boys with autism spectrum disorders show superior performance on the adult Embedded Figures Test

•Perceptual processing in childhood ASD is tested with the children's and adult EFT.•Boys with ASD show superior performance on the adult version of the EFT only.•Differential results become (more) manifest with increased task complexity.•Sufficiently sensitive tests are needed to assess visual-perceptual skills in ASD.

Weak central coherence is frequently studied using the Embedded Figures Test (EFT) yielding mixed and ambiguous results. In this study, the performance of 36 boys (9–14 years) with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is compared with that of 46 typical peers using both the children's and the adult version of the EFT. Only in the adult version did the ASD group outperform the controls in terms of accuracy. Corrected for age and pIQ, a subgroup of boys with Autistic Disorder (AD) showed superior perceptual processing capacities, while the performance of boys with PDD-NOS and Asperger Syndrome was in between that of those with AD and the controls. The findings strongly suggest that children and adolescents with ASD will only show superior results on visual-perceptual tests if the task complexity and thus their sensitivity is sufficiently high to challenge typically developing age-matched peers.