“Oddly enough it is the very opposite of the way people on the spectrum think. Temple Grandin calls it ‘thinking in pictures’.”
I have a child on the spectrum who seems to think in pictures. When he describes something they did in gan, he’ll give lots of detail about little irrelevant things in the room and will even point in various directions to show me where the window is and where the nail in the wall is and where the cracked tile is even though we’re obviously at home and not in his gan. He seems to take a picture of it all with his eyes and store it in his mind. He can also memorize the contents of a paper by reading it once or twice. Pretty fascinating.