Previous studies have found reduced leftward bias of facial processing in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, it is not clear whether they manifest a leftward bias in general visual processing. To shed light on this issue, the current study used the manual line bisection task to assess children 5 to 15 years of age with ASD…

This study examined the effect of increasing visual perceptual load on auditory awareness for social and non-social stimuli in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD, n = 63) and typically developing (TD, n = 62) adolescents. Using an inattentional deafness paradigm, a socially meaningful ('Hi') or a non-social (neutral tone) critical…

An action's end state can be anticipated by considering the agent's goal, or simply by projecting the movement trajectory. Theories suggest that individuals with autism spectrum condition (ASC) have difficulties anticipating other's goal-directed actions, caused by an impairment using prior information. We examined whether children, adolescents…

Differences in audiovisual integration are commonly observed in autism. Temporal binding windows (TBWs) of audiovisual speech can be trained (i.e., narrowed) in non-autistic adults; this study evaluated a computer-based perceptual training in autistic youth and assessed whether treatment outcomes varied according to individual characteristics.…

Accumulating studies have reported facial emotion recognition or facial perception impairments in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). To clarify the specificity of the emotion recognition impairment, this study examined the relationships between facial emotion recognition and facial perception abilities in ASD. Twenty-two adolescents with…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate superior performances on visuo-spatial tasks emphasizing local information processing; however, findings from studies involving hierarchical stimuli are inconsistent. Wide age ranges and group means complicate their interpretability. Children and adolescents with and without ASD completed…

To evaluate an eye tracking task as a predictor and outcome measure of treatment response for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) social skills interventions, adolescents and young adults with ASD completed the eye tracking task before, immediately after, and two months after completing Social Cognition and Interaction Training for Autism (SCIT-A). The…

Visual attention of adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was assessed using a change blindness paradigm. Twenty-five adolescents with ASD aged 12-18 years and 25 matched typically developing (TD) adolescents viewed 36 pairs of digitized real-world images. Each pair of images was displayed in a "flicker paradigm" whereby a…

Local and global visual processing abilities and processing style were investigated in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) versus typically developing individuals, children versus adolescents and boys versus girls. Individuals with ASD displayed more attention to detail in daily life, while laboratory tasks showed slightly reduced…

Previous studies have suggested audiovisual multisensory integration (MSI) may be atypical in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, much of the research having found an alteration in MSI in ASD involved socio-communicative stimuli. The goal of the current study was to investigate MSI abilities in ASD using lower-level stimuli that are not…

Stress and anxiety have a negative impact on working memory systems by competing for executive resources and attention. Broad memory deficits, anxiety, and elevated stress have been reported in individuals with chromosome 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11.2DS). We investigated anxiety and physiological stress reactivity in relation to visuospatial…

Adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) performed two priming experiments in which they implicitly processed a prime stimulus, containing high and/or low spatial frequency information, and then explicitly categorized a target face either as male/female (gender task) or as positive/negative (Valence task). Adolescents with ASD…

While most typically developing (TD) participants have a coarse-to-fine processing style, people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) seem to be less globally and more locally biased when processing visual information. The stimulus-specific spatial frequency content might be directly relevant to determine this temporal hierarchy of visual…

Atypical visual processing in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) does not seem to reside in an isolated processing component, such as global or local processing. We therefore developed a paradigm that requires the interaction between different processes--an identification task with Gaborized object outlines--and applied this to two age…

The underlying neural mechanisms of implicit and explicit facial emotion recognition (FER) were studied in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to matched typically developing controls (TDC). EEG was obtained from N = 21 ASD and N = 16 TDC. Task performance, visual (P100, N170) and cognitive (late positive…