Autistic people may experience gestalt perception in any sensory modality. A person with auditory gestalt perception has a great difficulty to concentrate on one auditory stimulus, for example, someone's voice, as it goes as a package with all the environmental noises: fans working, doors opening, somebody coughing, cars passing, etc. Their ears seem to pick up all sounds with equal intensity. If they try to screen out the background noise, they also screen out the voice they are trying to attend. The same problem occurs when several people are talking at once: it is difficult for them to listen to one voice and screen out the others (Grandin, 1996). They often feel 'drowned' in the 'sea of background noise'. In crowded places their brain seems to try to process all the stimuli around them - what each person is saying, and what other noises and sounds coming from all directions mean. Children with visual gestalt perception experience all visual stimuli (details) around them simultaneously. They can see (not process) changes that happen in milliseconds where non-autistics are 'blind' to them. For instance, many autistic individuals visually experience (see) flickering of fluorescent lights, that makes the environment around them visually unstable.
It is common knowledge that autistic people do not like changes and like routines. If a slightest detail is changed (e.g., a picture on the wall is not straight, or a piece of furniture has been moved a few inches to the side), the whole scene (gestalt) is different, i.e. unfamiliar. For them to recognize things, things must be exactly the same they have already experienced. Only then they will know what to do with them (Williams, 1996). The same is true about routines: if something goes differently, they do not know what to do. Gestalt of the situation is different. All this results in fear, stress and frustration.
Paradoxically, autistic people have much more trouble with slight changes than with big ones. For example, they can cope with going somewhere unfamiliar much better than with changes in the arrangement of the furniture in their room. The explanation of this phenomenon lies in the gestalt perception. Their encounter with new information is a new gestalt, which will be stored, while any changes in the 'familiar gestalt' bring confusion: on the one hand, it becomes a completely 'new picture', on the other hand, in the familiar situation they are confronted with an unfamiliar environment.
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