In typical development, infants form predictions about future events based on incoming sensory information, which is essential for perception and goal-directed action. It has been suggested that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) make predictions differently compared to neurotypical individuals. We investigated how infants who later…

Participants with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (n = 121, mean [SD] age: 14.6 [8.0] years) and typically developing (TD) controls (n = 40, 16.4 [13.3] years) were presented with a series of videos representing biological motion on one side of a computer monitor screen and non-biological motion on the other, while their eye movements were…

Autistic individuals often present atypicalities in adaptation--the continuous recalibration of perceptual systems driven by recent sensory experiences. Here, we examined such atypicalities in human biological motion. We used a dual-task paradigm, including a running-speed discrimination task ('comparing the speed of two running silhouettes') and…

To investigate how people with Autism are affected by the presence of goals during imitation, we conducted a study to measure movement kinematics and eye movements during the imitation of goal-directed and goal-less hand movements. Our results showed that a control group imitated changes in movement kinematics and increased the level that they…

Experiments suggesting that a change in eye gaze creates a reflexive attention shift tend to confound motion direction and terminal eye direction. However, motion and the onset of motion are known to capture attention. Current thinking about social cognition in autism suggests that there might be a deficit in responding to social (eye gaze) cues…

Social avoidance is a core phenotypic characteristic of fragile X syndrome (FXS) that has critical cognitive and social consequences. However, no study has examined modulation of multiple social avoidant behaviors in children with FXS. In the current study, we introduce the "Social Approach Scale" (SAS), an observation scale that includes physical…