In January, a controversial report claimed that people with autism have 'eagle-eye' vision. Now, four scientists have published rebuttals to that study, citing major flaws in the way the experiment was carried out.In the original paper, Emma Ashwin used a computer program to measure how well people with autism can see super-small pictures. Controlled experiments of this kind hadn't been done before, but there are many anecdotal stories of people with autism noticing tiny details of a scene (sometimes at the expense of seeing the 'big picture').Ashwin's experiment, published in Biological Psychiatry, found that adults with autism have off-the-charts scores of visual acuity: 2.79 — meaning they can resolve images at 2.79 times the distance of average adults — compared with 1.44 for the control group. She suggested that this super vision may stem from an unusually large number of densely packed eye cells.These numbers are striking, but might be meaningless.Read more at...SFARI, July 2009.