WEAK CENTRAL COHERENCE (Frith et al.)

The theme of a lack of coordination or integration in cognitive processes has led to an explanation of autism as a weakness of what is called central coherence, the capacity to bind together separate details or processes into complex objects or contexts.

A lack of central coherence explains autistic impairments in tasks that demand configural processing of relationships between separate perceptual or cognitive elements, such as recognising faces, following a conversation, or generalising a skill to a new context,
and also explains autistic superiorities in tasks where piecemeal processing of individual details is an asset, such as identifying individual geometric figures embedded in a complex shape, copying block designs, or reading phonetically without comprehension.

Although the idea of weak central coherence has a great deal of descriptive value for autistic behaviour, it isn't really an explanation that can be tested, since it makes no claims about the underlying cognitive and neurophysiological processes.