Atypical sensory perception and motor impairments are primary features of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that indicate atypical development and predict social and non-social challenges. However, their link is poorly understood. Sensory perception is often integrated with motor processes when a sensory effect is temporally contiguous with the motor…

Language plays a fundamental role in enabling flexible, goal-directed behaviour. This study investigated whether the contribution of language to instruction encoding is modulated by the expression of autism traits, as measured by the Autism Spectrum Quotient (ASQ) questionnaire. Participants (N = 108) completed six choice reaction time tasks, with…

Purpose: Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is a single-gene disorder characterized by moderate to severe cognitive impairment and a high association with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Atypical visual attention is a feature of FXS, ASD, and ADHD. Thus, studying early attentional patterns in young…

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) present atypical sensory processing in the perception of moving stimuli and biological motion. The present study aims to explore the performance of young adults with ASD in a time to contact (TTC) estimation task involving social and non-social stimuli. TTC estimation involves extrapolating the…

Word learning depends on attention -- children must focus on the right things at the right times. However, autistic children often display restricted interests, limiting their intake of stimuli during word learning. This study investigates how category interests influence word learning in autism and neurotypical development. Autistic and…

Some theories have proposed that autistic individuals have difficulty learning predictive relationships. We tested this hypothesis using a serial reaction time task in which participants learned to predict the locations of a repeating sequence of target locations. We conducted a large-sample online study with 61 autistic and 71 neurotypical…

Research is equivocal on whether attention orienting is atypical in autism. This study investigated two types of attention orienting in autistic people and accounted for the potential confounders of alerting level, co-occurring symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and anxiety, age, and sex. Twenty-seven autistic participants…