Are you a "beeliner?"

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I saw a BBC Horizon documentary called "Living With Autism" recently. They had a box with a sliding lid, and the box had a nice little toy boat inside it. They demonstrated to a child how to open the box, and the demonstrator tapped the box before sliding the lid open (tapping the box was actually unnecessary), then they asked the child to open the box. Neurotypical kids generally followed the demonstrated procedure exactly, tapping the box before opening it. Autistic kids generally just opened the box, eliminating the unnecessary step.

I thought about my own behaviour, and noticed that I would have done what the autistic kids did. I realised that I have a strong preference for "cutting to the chase," for stripping out pointless palarva and making things easy. I hate it when I see that a task can be performed easily and somebody forces me to do it in a roundabout way, I can't stand bloated protocols. With the mating game, although I understand a lot about mainstream NT methods, I always think it would be much better if all the usual flirting and game playing could be swept aside and people would just directly say what they wanted. I always want books to be recreated as concise pamphlets.

So I was wondering, is it just me, or do Aspies in general have this efficient, "beeline" approach to achieving goals? Or was the Horizon experiment showing something else, like a difference in leader-following tendencies? Or is it the same thing?

I'm a "cutting to the chase" kind of guy.

That's interesting. In this program, how did they frame the difference? Did they say the one kind of child versus the other was "right"? Honestly, I would be ashamed if I was one of the children that copied the unnecessary step.

Yes, I would say I am the type of person that tries to do stuff in the quickest most efficient way. Never cared for procedure or busy work.

if someone gives me instructions to do something then i'll follow them as exactly as i can because i think i'll mess stuff up otherwise. but if there's no direct procedure to do a thing then of course i'll do it in the most efficient way.

yep. efficiency.

From the description you have given of how the study went, I imagine I would have tapped the box, because I would have seen it as a "following instructions" test and done what they demonstrator had shown me. I was a very, very obedient kid.

But, in general, I'm all about efficiency and cutting out unnecessary stuff in order to get things done, if I feel I have the opportunity to do so.

i do, but with me, especially with interacting, i feel like i'm either overly polite or in your face. I CAN'T HIT A MIDDLE GROUND

The experiment is intended to show "something else".
That being the tendency to follow directions from others.

Human children tend to be smarter than adult chimps in learning most tasks. But human children are fooled by the lid experiment, but adult chimps are not. A group of chimps will watch the human person in the white coat demonstrate how to open the lid (with the taps), and the chimps ignore him, study the thing, and open it right up with out the finger tapping. I guess autistics don't like to mimic, and or memorize steps. But they can figure stuff out.

Myself. Following directions does not come easy. Would rather look at a map than have to memorize directions. And prefer to cook things that I can improvise on the spot (omlets, and meatballs) to having go by a recipe for a casserole.

Hmm.......that's my gut reaction too - I'm definitely proud of my ability to cut through the crap and get the required result while others waste time with unnecessary frills. But is there more to it than meets my eye?

IMO you've asked an intriguing question. Does the (presumably NT) autism specialist see a different value to the one we see, and is she right? I don't recall exactly how they framed the difference, but I'll try and dig out the original video, and find out what they said. It was actually posted here on WP a week or so ago.

This describes me, and what I would have done/would do, and, for the very same reasons. . .

I've seen that documentary as well. I think that I, even as a child, would have understood what was expected, but would roll my eyes and open it directly anyway.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982213002078

In this article, they mention that they told the child to "get the toy, as fast as you can". A detail that was not mentioned within ToughDiamond's post. Based on this additional dimension, I would want to retract my previous post, and I would say, that I would most likely have eliminated the step of tapping on the box, simply because that would have been the most logical approach to getting the toy as fast as I could.

If the researcher was present, i'd tap the box i think.
If the researcher wasn't present, i would not tap; i am all for effiency, but i do know how to follow orders, when observed

Correct - it wasn't mentioned in the video either, which was the only description of the experiment I'd seen until now. Here's the thread that linked to the video:
viewtopic.php?t=289030
(If you're in the USA, scroll down to the 3rd post for links to the video that will work for you)
The experiment is described at 35m15s, at least in the Dailymotion version of the video.

Here's what they said: "One kind [of imitation] might not be so easy for people with autism, but might be crucial to the way most of us bond with each other and fit into the social world"
So, they're framing the difference as an impairment of imitation, apparently in spite of the ASD kids performing better on the task they were actually asked to do (i.e. get the toy as quickly as possible), assuming they're talking about exactly the same experiment. That seems preposterous to me.

But the plot thickens. Turning from the popular science video to the more rigorous article I see this: "Children with ASC were significantly worse at judging the rationality of actions" - a second part of the test, not mentioned in the video, got the kids to rate the teacher's actions (tapping the box, opening the box etc.) as silly or sensible, and the ASD kids performed badly at that.
"they do understand the rating scale and are able to make judgements about the rationality of actions, yet they do not discriminate rational and irrational actions as clearly as TD children. There is no evidence that reduced overimitation in autism is driven by better detection of action rationality or by better casual reasoning."
They seem to be saying that the Aspies perform better at the given task by ignoring the silly instructions, but can't tell the difference between the silly and sensible instructions when specifically tested for that.
Did the Aspie kids behave like naturalplastic's chimps, solving the problem without recourse to the instructions at all?

[I had a bit of trouble with the above link, probably because of my use of NoScript or something, so here's an alternative one in pdf format, which may work better for some people:]
http://www.antoniahamilton.com/MarshPea ... tprint.pdf