Big Picture Thinking - Using Central Coherence Theory to Support Social Skills: A Book for Students

Many people who have difficulties with social cognition, including those on the autism spectrum, are not able to see the “big picture” of a situation. That is, they tend to focus, or even “hyper-focus,” on the details within the larger whole of a concept, conversation, story, picture or situation, and have difficulty recognizing the main idea, topic or general point. Big Picture Thinking was written to help students with cognitive deficits “see” how individual pieces of social information fit into a larger context, so that they may begin to become “big picture thinkers” and, therefore be more successful.

Aileen Collucci is a licensed speech-language pathologist with a private practice in Little Falls, NJ. She specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of persons with social-communication deficits. Aileen has over 18 years of experience in the field, which includes developing and leading a successful social-communication skills group intervention program in Fairfield, NJ. She has conducted training workshops for parents of children with special needs and educational professionals in many areas including social skills intervention planning, autism and pragmatic language development and disorders. She holds a Master's Degree in Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology from New York University and state licenses in Speech and Language Pathology in both New Jersey and New York. She also maintains a Certificate of Clinical Competence from the American Speech-Language and Hearing Association.Aileen has a considerable interest in working with families to encourage carry-over of socialization and communication skills from the clinic to other contexts and she frequently consults with parents and school districts to better understand how to incorporate social-cognitive interventions into the educational programs of students with autism and related language-based learning difficulties. When she isn't working Aileen enjoys spending time with her son Cary, her family and friends.