Ambigous figures are drawings that seem to flip from being one thing to another.
Psychologists Melissa Allen and Alison Chambers recently showed these images to teenagers with autism in an attempt to find out whether they were able to perceive the effect normally: Implicit and explicit understanding of ambiguous ?gures by adolescents with autism spectrum disorder
A leading theory of autism is weak central coherence - the idea that autistic people tend to be focussed on details, rather than the "big picture". This might predict that autism would interfere with the perception of these figures because the ambiguity is all about the global, gestalt meaning: the details are fixed, but you can see them as adding up to two different things.
The autistic teens and a control group were showed the images and asked to copy them using a pen and paper. Then their drawings were rated for "duckness" or ...
