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…

By approximately 6 years of age, children can use time-based visual selection to ignore stationary stimuli, already in the visual field and prioritize the selection of newly arriving stimuli. This ability can be studied using preview search, a version of the visual search paradigm with an added temporal component, in which one set of distractors…

Sensory processing difficulties affect the development of sensorimotor skills in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, the effect of sensory information on postural control is unclear in the ASD adult population. The present study examined the effect of visual information on postural control as well as the attentional demands…

Joint attention--the mutual focus of 2 individuals on an item--speeds detection and discrimination of target information. However, what happens to that information beyond the initial perceptual episode? To fully comprehend and engage with our immediate environment also requires working memory (WM), which integrates information from second to…

From early in development, segmenting events unfolding in the world in meaningful ways renders input more manageable and facilitates interpretation and prediction. Yet, little is known about how children process action structure in events composed of multiple coarse-grained actions. More importantly, little is known about the time course of action…

The aim of the experiments was to investigate how manipulating the contrast of the signal and noise dots in a random dot kinematogram (RDK), influenced on motion coherence thresholds in adults with dyslexia. In the first of two experiments, coherent motion thresholds were measured when the contrasts of the signal and noise dots in an RDK were…

Purpose: The role of vision in speech representation was investigated in congenitally blind speakers and sighted speakers by studying the correlates of contrastive focus, a prosodic condition in which phonemic contrasts are enhanced. It has been reported that the lips (visible articulators) are less involved in implementing the rounding feature…

Biological motion is easily perceived by neurotypical observers when encoded in point-light displays. Some but not all relevant research shows significant deficits in biological motion perception among those with ASD, especially with respect to emotional displays. We tested adults with and without ASD on the perception of masked biological motion…

The goal of the current study was to investigate whether a visual coupling between two people can produce spontaneous interpersonal postural coordination and change their intrapersonal postural coordination involved in the control of stance. We examined the front-to-back head displacements of participants and the angular motion of their hip and…

The "body inversion effect" refers to superior recognition of upright than inverted images of the human body and indicates typical configural processing. Previous research by Reed et al. using static images of the human body shows that people with autism fail to demonstrate this effect. Using a novel task in which adults, adolescents…

Preschoolers who explore objects haptically often fail to recognize those objects in subsequent visual tests. This suggests that children may represent qualitatively different information in vision and haptics and/or that children's haptic perception may be poor. In this study, 72 children (2 1/2-5 years of age) and 20 adults explored unfamiliar…

People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often show inferior global motion performance with superior performance in detail form perception, suggesting dysfunction of the dorsal visual stream. To elucidate the neural basis of impaired global motion perception in ASD, we measured psychophysical threshold and visual event-related potentials (ERPs)…

Visual information can specify spatial layout with respect to the observer (egocentric) or with respect to an external frame of reference (allocentric). People can use both of these types of visual spatial information to guide their hands. The question arises if movements based on egocentric and movements based on allocentric visual information…

A large body of research has reported visual perception deficits in both people with dyslexia and autistic spectrum disorders. In this study, we compared form and motion coherence detection between a group of adults with high-functioning autism, a group with Asperger's disorder, a group with dyslexia, and a matched control group. It was found that…

When a moving object abruptly disappears, this profoundly influences its localization by the visual system. In Experiment 1, 2 aligned objects moved across the screen, and 1 of them abruptly disappeared. Observers reported seeing the objects misaligned at the time of the offset, with the continuing object leading. Experiment 2 showed that the…