Impairments in joint attention are considered core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and are crucial for early assessment and intervention. However, existing information about visual attention during joint attention and its relation to developmental functioning is limited. The current study investigated the visual attention differences…

This study aims to identify predictors of treatment outcome in young children with ASD within a European context, where service provision of intervention remains sporadic. We investigated whether a child's age at baseline, intensity of the intervention provided, type of intervention, child's level of social orienting and cognitive skills at…

This study tested whether including objects perceived as highly interesting by children with autism during a gaze following task would result in increased first fixation durations on the target objects. It has previously been found that autistic children differentiate less between an object another person attends to and unattended objects in terms…

Prosaccade and antisaccade errors in the context of social and nonsocial stimuli were investigated in youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 19) a matched control sample (n = 19), and a small sample of youth with obsessive compulsive disorder (n = 9). Groups did not differ in error rates in the prosaccade condition for any stimulus…

Although there is good evidence that the behavioral traits of autism extend in lesser form to the general population, there has been limited investigation of whether cognitive features of the disorder also accompany these milder traits. This study investigated whether the superiority in visuospatial analysis established for individuals with autism…

Individuals with Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) experience difficulties understanding the non-verbal cues conveyed by others that provide symbolic information about relationships between self, other, and environmental events. This study examined whether these difficulties reflect underlying problems in the identification of temporal…

This study examined Theory of Mind in Williams syndrome (WS) and in normal chronological age-matched and mental age-matched control groups, using a picture sequencing task. This task assesses understanding of pretence, intention and false belief, while controlling for social-script knowledge and physical cause-and-effect reasoning. The task was…

This study compared the performance of 17 children with autism, 17 children with mental retardation, and 31 normally developing children on a false belief task performance using a posting manipulation (a pictorial cue which facilitates the false belief performance of normal 3-year-olds). The performance of autistic children was significantly…

This study examined the development of neural processing of auditorally presented words in high functioning children with autism. The purpose was to test the hypothesis that electrophysiological abnormalities associated with impairments in early cortical processing and in semantic processing persist into early adolescence in autistic individuals.…