Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Evidence suggests that the organization of semantic knowledge in autistic populations uses qualitatively different organization principles than neurotypical populations. Across two experiments, autistic and neurotypical adults rated the relatedness of abstract and concrete word pairs and completed the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ). There were no group differences in relatedness ratings; both groups rated abstract pairs as more related than concrete pairs. However, autistic participants reported significantly lower vividness of visual imagery than neurotypical participants. Critically, a VVIQ x group interaction emerged. Higher imagery scores predicted higher relatedness ratings only in the autistic group across both concept types. These findings demonstrate that equivalent semantic performance can arise through distinct processing pathways. Autistic individuals show perceptually grounded semantic processing that scales with imagery ability, while neurotypical individuals' semantic judgments seem to operate independently of visual imagery. This pattern reveals qualitative differences in how semantic knowledge is organized.