Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show atypical processing of facial expressions. Research with autistic toddlers suggests that abnormalities in processing of spatial frequencies (SFs) contribute to such differences. The current event-related-potential (ERP) study investigated differences between 10-month-old infants with high- and…

Holistic processing of upright, but not inverted, faces is a marker of perceptual expertise for faces. This pattern is shown by typically developing individuals beginning at age 7 months. Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare neurogenetic developmental disorder characterized by extreme interest in faces from a very young age. Research on the effects of…

Perceptual processing in autism is associated with both "strengths" and "weaknesses" but within a literature that varies widely in terms of the assessments used. We report data from 12 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 12 age and IQ matched neurotypical controls tested on a set of tasks using the same stimuli…

This study was inspired by the more locally oriented processing style in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). A modified multiple object tracking (MOT) task was administered to a group of children with and without ASD. Participants not only had to distinguish moving targets from distracters, but they also had to track targets when they were visually…

Cognitive research proposes that social cognition (SC), executive functions (EF) and local processing style (weak CC) may be fruitful areas for research into the familial-genetic underpinnings of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The performance of 140 children with ASD, 172 siblings and 127 controls on tasks measuring SC (face recognition,…

It has been established that typically developing individuals have a bias to attend to facial information in the left visual field (LVF) more than in the right visual field. This bias is thought to arise from the right hemisphere's advantage for processing facial information, with evidence suggesting it to be driven by the configural demands of…

This study evaluated whether atypical face processing in autism extends from human to cartoon faces for which they show a greater interest. Twenty children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) were compared to two groups of typically developing children, matched on chronological and mental age. They processed the emotional expressions of real…

Previous studies indicate that Multiple Complex Developmental Disorder (MCDD) children differ from PDD-NOS and autistic children on a symptom level and on psychophysiological functioning. Children with MCDD (n = 21) and PDD-NOS (n = 62) were compared on two facets of social-cognitive functioning: identification of neutral faces and facial…

We propose an "Enhanced Perceptual Functioning" model encompassing the main differences between autistic and non-autistic social and non-social perceptual processing: locally oriented visual and auditory perception, enhanced low-level discrimination, use of a more posterior network in "complex" visual tasks, enhanced perception…