Previous studies reported mixed findings on autistic individuals' pitch perception relative to neurotypical (NT) individuals. We investigated whether this may be partly due to individual differences in cognitive abilities by comparing their performance on various pitch perception tasks on a large sample (n = 164) of autistic and NT children and…

This study examined individual differences as well as the development of sensory processing difficulties in children with Williams syndrome (WS) using a cross-sectional (Experiment 1) and longitudinal design (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, a clustering approach of sensory processing scores suggested two groups. Experiment 2 showed that the…

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show atypical attention, particularly for social events. The new Multisensory Attention Assessment Protocol (MAAP) assesses fine-grained individual differences in attention disengagement, maintenance, and audiovisual matching for social and nonsocial events. We investigated the role of competing…

The present study examined the relationship between multisensory integration and the temporal binding window (TBW) for multisensory processing in adults with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The ASD group was less likely than the typically developing group to perceive an illusory flash induced by multisensory integration during a sound-induced…

Atypical visual perception has increasingly been described in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and linked to quantitative, autism-like features that are present in children and adults without ASD. We investigated whether individual differences in visual processing skills were related to quantitative measures of autism traits in a…

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by early onset qualitative impairments in reciprocal social development. However, whether individuals with ASD exhibit impaired recognition of facial expressions corresponding to basic emotions is debatable. To investigate subtle deficits in facial emotion recognition, we asked 14 children…

The present study examined individual differences in theory of mind (ToM) among a group of 60 children (7-11 years-old) with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and average intelligence. Using open-ended and structured tasks to measure affective ToM, cognitive ToM, and spontaneous social attribution, we explored the nature of ToM and assessed whether…

The Short Sensory Profile (SSP) is one of the most commonly used measures of sensory features in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but psychometric studies in this population are limited. Using confirmatory factor analysis, we evaluated the structural validity of the SSP subscales in ASD children. Confirmatory factor models exhibited…

Associations between variability in sympathetic nervous system arousal and individual differences in symptom severity were examined for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Thirty-four families participated in a laboratory visit that included continuous measurement of electrodermal activity (EDA) during a battery of naturalistic and…

We report the first study on pronoun use by an under-studied research population, children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exposed to American Sign Language from birth by their deaf parents. Personal pronouns cause difficulties for hearing children with ASD, who sometimes reverse or avoid them. Unlike speech pronouns, sign pronouns are…

Being able to manage reputation is an important social skill, but it is unclear whether autistic children can manage reputation. This study investigated whether 33 autistic children matched to 33 typical children could implicitly or explicitly manage reputation. Further, we examined whether cognitive processes--theory of mind, social motivation,…

Both autism spectrum (ASD) and anxiety disorders are associated with atypical neural and attentional responses to emotional faces, differing in affective face processing from typically developing peers. Within a longitudinal study of children with ASD (23 male, 3 female), we hypothesized that early ERPs to emotional faces would predict concurrent…

Numerous studies investigated executive functioning (EF) problems in people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) using laboratory EF tasks. As laboratory task performances often differ from real life observations, the current study focused on EF in everyday life of 118 children and adolescents with ASD (6-18 years). We investigated age-related and…

Impairments in executive abilities such as cognitive flexibility have been identified in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). It remains unclear, however, whether such individuals also experience impairments in another executive ability: inhibitory control. In the present study, we administered three inhibitory tasks to 18 children…

Several different methodological approaches that have been used in studying language in children with autism are outlined. In classic studies, children with autism are compared to comparison groups typically matched on age, IQ, or mental age in order to identify which aspects of language are uniquely impaired in autism. Several methodological…