Mauricio Martins and colleagues studied a minimally verbal autistic child (A.) with hyperlexia: he can say words in Spanish, Catalan, and English without understanding their meaning, and only speaks in 2-word declarative phrases. The researchers tested whether A. could follow recursive visual rules using a touchscreen task in which fractal-like images unfolded step by step. They compared his performance to that of 26 typically developing children. A. performed above chance in both a visual recursion task and a simpler "iteration" control task, and his accuracy did not significantly differ from that of the control group.
The authors argue that a core recursive capacity can operate in visuospatial systems without requiring fully developed linguistic recursion. In their view, language recursion likely depends on more complex intentional and motor systems, while visual recursion can arise from an interaction between a basic combinatorial mechanism and preserved visual-conceptual abilities. This single-case study highlights how autistic cognition can show sharp dissociations between language and nonverbal reasoning — and suggests that recursion may not be exclusively grounded in language.
Contact: Maurício Martins (University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria)
Rosselló, J., Celma-Miralles, A., & Martins, M. (2025). Visual Recursion can develop in the absence of linguistic recursion: A case study. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 16. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1540985