An interesting and refreshing paper from Simon Baron-Cohen's autism group from Cambridge. The results themselves are pretty boring - they found that people with autism have normal visual acuity.
But the story behind it is rather spicy.
Back in 2009, a Cambridge group - different authors, but led by "SBC", published a report claiming that people with autism have exceptionally acute vision. Their average visual acuity was claimed to be 2.8
On this scale, 1.0 is defined as normal, and a sharp-eyed young adult with excellent eyesight would get about 1.5. 2.8 means nearly three times as good. Which is, literally, superhuman - a bird of prey would be happy with that. The paper was titled
"Eagle-Eyed Visual Acuity In Autism".
However, what followed was straight out of the Book of Obadiah - "Though you soar like the eagle ... from there I will bring you down, sayeth the Lord". ...
