Bottom-up processing
Top-down thinkers have a linear thought process, a deductive approach, a “concept-before-the-details” type brain.
Bottom-up thinkers have an associative thought process, an inductive approach, a “details-before-the-concept” type brain.
Autistic people tend to belong overwhelmingly to the second category.1
Instead of fitting new information into a preexisting box, contextualizing based on prior knowledge–or even constrained by prior knowledge–the autistic mind takes in a bombardment of details and sorts it into a comprehensible picture.
Is this one reason you can give me Terra Ignota or Harrow the Ninth and I glom it like candy? The whole real world is basically puzzle-book worldbuilding.