With the widespread use of masks in the COVID-19 pandemic, it is crucial to understand how emotion recognition is affected by partial face covering. Since individuals with autism spectrum condition often tend to look at the lower half of the face, they are likely to be particularly restricted in emotion recognition by people wearing masks, since…

Research consistently shows that autistic adults do not attend to faces as much as non-autistic adults. However, this conclusion is largely based on studies using pre-recorded videos or photographs as stimuli. In studies using real social scenarios, the evidence is not as clear. To explore the extent to which differences in findings relate to…

Predictive coding theories of autism suggest that symptoms could result from an atypical learning of expectations. We assessed whether adults with autism could learn expectations in an uncertain context. Twenty-nine neurotypicals and 25 autistic adults participated in an associative learning task. After hearing a tone, participants had to predict…

Considering the mixed nature of reports of flexibility difficulties in autism, we hypothesized that a task that more closely resembles the challenges faced in real life would help to assess these difficulties. Autistic and typically developing adults performed an online Emotional Shifting Task, involving non-explicit unpredictable shifts of…

Self-determination is a complex process with several components, such as making choices and independence. However, limited research on self-determination has focused on individuals with moderate to severe autism spectrum disorder. This study aimed to support independent leisure engagement and choice-making of leisure activities for this population…

Visual perspective-taking is the ability to perceive the world from another person's perspective, and research on visual perspective-taking ability in children with autism spectrum conditions yielded inconsistent results. To solve a visual perspective-taking task, people can mentally rotate themselves to another person's location (embodied…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) display difficulties with response to joint attention in natural settings but often perform comparably to typically developing (TD) children in experimental studies of gaze following. Previous work comparing infants at elevated likelihood for ASD versus TD infants has manipulated aspects of the gaze…

Prior eye-tracking studies involving autistic individuals have focused on total looking time or proportion of looking time to key regions of interest. These studies have not examined another important feature, the ability to sustain attention to stimuli. In particular, the ability to sustain attention to a dynamic social stimulus might reflect…

Atypical attention is considered to have an important role in the development of autism. Yet, it remains unclear whether these attentional difficulties are specific to the social domain. This study aimed to examine attentional orienting in autistic and non-autistic adults from and to non-social and social stimuli. We utilised a modified…

Autistic children have difficulties in adapting their language for particular listeners and contexts. We asked whether these difficulties are more prominent when children are required to be cognitively flexible, when changing how they have previously referred to a particular object. We compared autistic (N = 30) with neuro-typical 5- to…

The present study investigated how the eye contact perception of ingroup and outgroup faces by Japanese adults with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder differed from that of age-, sex-, and IQ-matched typically developing individuals. The autism spectrum disorder and typically developing individuals were equally likely to perceive subtly…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders typically exhibit reduced visual attention towards social stimuli relative to neurotypical individuals. Importantly, however, attention is not a static process, and it remains unclear how such effects may manifest over time. Exploring these momentary changes in gaze behaviour can more clearly illustrate…

A common example of social differences in autism spectrum disorder is poor modulation of reciprocal gaze, including reduced duration of eye contact and difficulty detecting the aim of another's gaze. It remains unclear, however, whether such differences are specific to the social domain, or are instead indicative of broader alterations in…