Purpose: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex developmental condition including persistent challenges with social communication, restricted interests, and repetitive behavior. Though prospective memory failures are commonly observed in ASD population it has been less studied among adults with ASD. Prospective memory (PM) refers to the…

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…

Current theories of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) suggest atypical use of context in ASD, but little is known about how these atypicalities influence speech perception. We examined the influence of contextual information (lexical, spectral, and temporal) on phoneme categorization of people with ASD and in typically developed (TD) people. Across…

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…

Program evaluation is an essential practice for providers of behavior analytic services, as it helps providers understand the extent to which they are achieving their intended mission to the community they serve. A proposed method for conducting such evaluations, is through the use of a consecutive case series design, for which cases are…

Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) tend to struggle with reading comprehension, often resulting in difficulties with inference generation. While most of the previous research has focused on the product of comprehension, we report a preliminary validation of an experimental reading task in English to measure, by means of eye-movements,…

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…

This study explored the salient characteristics of transactions within parent-child engagement and investigated relationships between transactional characteristics and future identification of autism. The main aims of the study were to (1) examine if parents/children and their initial behaviors impact the length of transaction; (2) determine…

Although caregiving responsibilities and need for support persist and evolve across the life course in families with autistic youth or youth with other developmental disabilities (DDs), little is known about support during their child's adulthood years. Therefore, the present study used a mixed-methods approach to examine change and stability in…

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…

Purpose: Differences in emotional experience and expression have long been recognized as common in the presentation of autism, yet research examining emotional expression in early childhood is limited, with mixed findings. Understanding emotional reactivity and expression in autism in early life is an essential step towards uncovering the…

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…

This was an exploratory cross-sectional study comparing 45 children with ASD to 24 typically developing drug-naïve controls, group-matched on age, sex, and body mass index. Objective data was obtained using the following: an ambulatory circadian monitoring device; saliva samples to determine dim light melatonin onset (DLMO): and three…

The family has a key role in the obesity management of children with autism. This study examines the relationship between the nutrition-physical activity behaviors of autistic children with their families and children's obesity levels during COVID-19 pandemic. The descriptive and cross-sectional study involved 80 parents of autistic children. A…