Second, to go a step further, the ability to accurately see the gestalt involves another Executive Function skill: metacognition, which is the ability to self-monitor our thinking and problem solving. They can put themselves in a teacher’s shoes and infer what she is looking for. When students can fluidly zoom in and out of small detail to big picture thinking, they successfully understand not only what is expected, but why they are doing it. First, the ability to shift her focus from a small detail (“Use the correct punctuation in this sentence.”) to a wider lens (“Keep this paragraph on-topic and use the correct sequence.”) requires the Executive Function skill of cognitive flexibility. Say, for example, a student is writing a paragraph in a lab report on the methods she used for a biology class experiment. The term gestalt means realizing that something is more than the sum of its individual parts - viewing the parts together allows you to see the full picture. Has your son ever lost points on a test or assignment because he did not follow all the directions? Does your daughter highlight everything when she reads and as a result can’t figure out what to study? Does your son complain about how his teacher is “torturing him” because he does not see the point of the assignment? If any of these common scenarios sound familiar, you may find yourself wondering, “Why does my child miss the big picture?”įirst, let’s look at the skills involved in seeing the big picture, or the gestalt. Building a Great Relationship with Your Child (14).adults with executive function challenges (15).Benefits of Executive Function Coaching (17).Executive Functioning for Children (21).Academic Coaching for College Students (23).Executive Functioning for Adolescents (38).Developing Executive Function Skills (56).This interpretation of a savant might not realize this, because although they can absorb and recall and the nitty gritty details of the person's condition, they are worse at seeing the bigger picture that these details create (unless that bigger picture is explicitly stated of course). Let's say the combinatorial effect is given all these injuries, this person will die. However, compared to a neurotypical person also knowledgeable in medicine, they would be less likely to realize the combinatorial effect of all these facts they know so well. In this scenario, the savant would absorb all the details as before. According to this interpretation, savants are less able to do this. Here, it's about not just seeing all the individual details, but being able to piece them together into a larger picture. The second interpretation, where the 'bigger picture' is the conceptually bigger picture. I know not all theories of the LATL implicate it in social processing, but the same logic could be applied to a different theory. They may conclude something unpleasant from the facts given, and state this conclusion without any cushioning, as they're forgetting the social implications of the meaning of what they're saying/about to say.

However, they would not as well at a neurotypical person see the social implications, and would therefore be less likely to remember to act socially appropriately given how someone's injured. They will absorb all the details facts of the injuries, and would be able to recall this perfectly (given they're a typical savant with a great memory capacity and recall). The person receiving the description has LATL damage / savantism as described by Snyder's theory.įollowing the first interpretation, where the 'bigger picture' is the survival/social context, this is how the savant will respond. Let's say someone describes a person with a set of injuries putting them in a life threatening condition. However, in the theory that says that the underlying mechanism of savantism is a hyper-focus on the details and thus a neglect of the bigger picture, is this 'bigger picture' the surivival/social context, or is it the conceptual context (in a more general sense)? I'll explain my question with an example: This is where 'the bigger picture' is often mentioned, the implications on survival and/or social interaction being defined as the bigger picture, which is true from an evolutionary perspective. This theory of his builds on the theory that Savant Syndrome is caused by lesioning in the left anterior temporal lobe, which is responsible for seeing the implications stimulus has on survival and/or social interaction. It is the theory of Allan Snyder that the underlying mechanism of savantism is an access to 'lower-level, less-processed information, before its packaged into holistic concepts and meaningful labels.' ( Snyder, 2009).

Ability to see the bigger picture