Several studies have reported that individuals with autism and Asperger's syndrome show a local processing bias on tasks involving features and configurations. This study assessed whether this bias results from differences in the perception of features or a cognitive bias to attend to features in autism as a consequence of a deficit in attending to configurations. Children with autism and typically developing children performed a task assessing the initial perceptual representation of features and configurations following a 50 ms stimulus display and the development of the perceptual representation by grouping processes following an 800 ms stimulus display. No differences were observed between the two groups, suggesting that the perceptual and attentional mechanisms marshalled by this task operate typically in children with autism.