What is Central Coherence in Childhood?

Central coherence is a child’s ability to grasp the main idea or “gist” of a concept, conversation, story, or picture. It’s about seeing the “gestalt”—the main thread that ties a whole story or situation together. Think of it as being a “big picture thinker.” This skill requires shifting attention away from minor details, maintaining focus on the core message, and remaining flexible enough to understand how everything connects.

Signs Your Child Might Be Struggling with Central Coherence

Children who find central coherence challenging may:

• Get lost in details, struggling to see the overall concept.
• Tell stories with an overwhelming amount of irrelevant information, making them hard to follow.
• Focus on a single “tree” (detail) and miss the entire “forest” (main idea).
• Share many facts but never get to the point.
• Narrate stories without a clear main character or plot, presenting only isolated details.
• Read fluently but have difficulty recalling or comprehending what they’ve read.
• Notice minute details (like a piece of fuzz on the floor) while overlooking more significant information.
• Work slowly on tasks due to being easily distracted by minor elements.

What Can Cause Central Coherence Challenges?

Difficulties with central coherence can stem from various areas, including:

• Attention: Children may struggle with shifting focus between different types of information or maintaining sustained attention on the main idea without immediate reinforcement. This can lead to easily being distracted by irrelevant details.
• Visual Processing: Challenges in accurately seeing objects and pictures can impact central coherence. This includes visual planning, which is the ability to visualize how something will look when parts are added or removed (e.g., understanding a whole pie from missing pieces).
• Rigidity: A tendency towards perfectionism, an intense focus on details, and resistance to change can make it hard for a child to see the big picture. This can be more pronounced when a child is frustrated or emotional, leading them to fixate on a single problem until it’s addressed.
• Restricted Interests: When a child’s attention is consistently drawn to a very specific interest, it can pull focus away from broader concepts or the main idea of a situation.

Supporting Your Child’s Central Coherence Skills

If you suspect your child struggles with getting lost in details, you can help by practicing:

• Answering questions about pictures: Have your child describe a picture to you without you seeing it. Ask questions like, “What is the main idea of this picture?” and then practice finding the main idea and supporting details together. You’ll quickly notice if this is an area of difficulty – for example, describing every blade of grass but missing the prominent squirrel in the image!
• Answering questions about stories: Progress from pictures to short stories. Tell a simple story with a clear main idea and a few supporting points, then have your child do the same. Using a visual storyboard can be helpful to illustrate the main idea and key details.
• Identifying the main idea in reading: Read short stories together, ideally without pictures, to encourage your child to create their own mental visuals. Help them distinguish between important details and those that are supportive but not central to the main idea. Make it a fun game!

These skills are highly amenable to intervention, and your consistent efforts can significantly improve your child’s comprehension over time.

When to Seek Professional Support

If central coherence challenges persist and impact your child’s social interactions or academic progress despite your efforts, further support or evaluation may be beneficial. Consider if their focus on detail is affecting their friendships or grades.

• Reading Tutor: A tutor trained in methods like the Visualizing and Verbalizing method (by Lindamood-Bell) can be invaluable. This approach is excellent for children struggling with central coherence, especially if it impacts oral or reading comprehension.
• Speech and Language Therapist: Can help with storytelling, identifying main ideas, social conversation skills, and general pragmatic language.
• Occupational Therapist: May assess and address fine motor skills and sensory integration needs that sometimes co-occur with central coherence difficulties.
• Psychologist or Neuropsychologist: Can conduct a comprehensive diagnostic evaluation to understand symptoms in context, especially if related to visual-spatial abilities, attention, social development, or learning.
• Therapist: Can work on emotional challenges and rigid thinking patterns that may cause frustration. Therapy can support emotional awareness, flexible thinking, emotion regulation, and coping strategies.
• Optometrist or Ophthalmologist: To evaluate vision or visual tracking if concerns are present.

Resources

• Barton, Erin. Educating Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders.
• Fein, Deborah (2011). “The Neuropsychology of Autism”.
• Giler, Janet Z. (2000). Socially ADDept: A manual for parents of children with ADHD and learning disabilities.
• Giler, Janet Z. (2011). Socially ADDept: Teaching social skills to children with ADHD, LD, and Asperger’s.
• Koegel, Lynn Kern & LaZebnik, Claire (2010). Growing up on the spectrum: A guide to life, love and learning for teens and young adults with autism and Asperger’s.
• Kroncke, Willard, & Huckabee (2016). Assessment of autism spectrum disorder: Critical issues in clinical forensic and school settings. Springer, San Francisco.