Movement is prospective. It structures self-generated engagement with objects and social partners and is fundamental to children's learning and development. In autistic children, previous reports of differences in movement kinematics compared to neurotypical peers suggest that its prospective organisation might be disrupted. Here, we employed a…

The shape bias, a preference for mapping new word labels onto the shape rather than the color or texture of referents, has been postulated as a word-learning mechanism. Previous research has shown deficits in the shape bias in children with autism even though they acquire sizeable lexicons. While previous explanations have suggested the atypical…

Children's gesture production precedes and predicts language development, but the pathways linking these domains are unclear. It is possible that gesture production assists in children's developing word comprehension, which in turn supports expressive vocabulary acquisition. The present study examines this mediation pathway in a population with…

Many individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit motor difficulties, but it is unknown whether manual motor skills improve, plateau, or decline in ASD in the transition from childhood into adulthood. Atypical development of manual motor skills could impact the ability to learn and perform daily activities across the life span. This…

This article outlines the "over-pruning hypothesis" of autism. The hypothesis originates in a neurocomputational model of the regressive sub-type (Thomas, Knowland & Karmiloff-Smith, 2011a, 2011b). Here we develop a more general version of the over-pruning hypothesis to address heterogeneity in the timing of manifestation of ASD,…

Despite well-documented attention deficits in children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), distinctions across types of attention problems and their association with academic attainment has not been fully explored. This study examines visual attention capacities and inattentive/hyperactive behaviours in 77 children aged 4 to…

Timing is essential for the development of cognitive skills known to be impaired in Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC), such as social cognition and episodic memory abilities. Despite the proposal that timing impairments may underpin core features of ASC, few studies have examined temporal processing in ASC and they have produced conflicting…

Statistical learning is characterized by detection of regularities in one's environment without an awareness or intention to learn, and it may play a critical role in language and social behavior. Accordingly, in this study we investigated the electrophysiological correlates of visual statistical learning in young children with autism…

A deficit in theory of mind (ToM), or the ability to infer the mental states of others, has been implicated as one of the major characteristics of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD); however, little attention has been devoted to possible differences in ToM ability within ASD. The current study examined ToM performance in children with early-onset…

We investigated whether fine motor and expressive language skills are related in the later-born siblings of children with autism (heightened-risk, HR infants) who are at increased risk for language delays. We observed 34 HR infants longitudinally from 12 to 36 months. We used parent report and standardized observation measures to assess fine motor…

Recent research indicates that toddlers and infants succeed at various "non-verbal" spontaneous-response false-belief tasks; here we asked whether toddlers would also succeed at verbal spontaneous-response false-belief tasks that imposed significant linguistic demands. We tested 2.5-year-olds using two novel tasks: a "preferential-looking" task in…

Despite the advances in understanding cognitive improvements in executive function in adolescence, much less is known about the influence of affective and social modulators on executive function and the biological underpinnings of these functions and sensitivities. Here, recent behavioral and neuroscientific studies are summarized that have used…

Two experiments were conducted to explore the extent to which individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), as well as young typically developing (TD) children, are explicitly aware of their own and others' intentions. In Experiment 1, participants with ASD were significantly less likely than age- and ability-matched comparison participants to…

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to examine functional anatomy of attention to social (eye gaze) and nonsocial (arrow) communicative stimuli in late childhood and in a disorder defined by atypical processing of social stimuli, Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Children responded to a target word ("LEFT"/"RIGHT") in the context of a…

Mounting clinical evidence suggests that abnormalities of social engagement in children with autism are present even during infancy. However, direct experimental documentation of these abnormalities is still limited. In this case report of a 15-month-old infant with autism, we measured visual fixation patterns to both naturalistic and ambiguous…