Individuals with ASD have been shown to have different pattern of functional connectivity. In this study, brain activity of participants with many and few autistic traits, was recorded using an fNIRS device, as participants preformed an interpersonal synchronization task. This type of task involves synchronization and functional connectivity of…

Individuals with ASD seem to construct categories via processes different to typically developing individuals. We examined whether individuals with ASD engage in structural alignment of exemplars when constructing categories. We taught children with ASD and typically developing children novel nouns for either single or multiple exemplars, and then…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) sometimes have difficulties learning categories. Past computational work suggests that such deficits may result from atypical representations in cortical maps. Here we use neural networks to show that idiosyncratic transformations of inputs can result in the formation of feature maps that impair…

In comparison to typically developing (TD) individuals, people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) appear to be worse in the fast extraction of the global meaning of a situation or picture. Ultra-rapid categorization [paradigm developed by Thorpe et al. ("Nature" 381:520-522, 1996)] involves such global information processing. We…

While much research has examined the development of facial recognition abilities, less is known about the ability of individuals with and without autism to categorize facial gender. The current study tested gender categorization abilities in high-functioning children (5-7 and 8-12 years), adolescents (13-17 years), and adults (18-53 years) with…

The current study investigated if deficits in processing emotional expression affect facial identity processing and vice versa in children with autism spectrum disorder. Children with autism and IQ and age matched typically developing children classified faces either by emotional expression, thereby ignoring facial identity or by facial identity…

To test the effects of providing relational cues at encoding and/or retrieval on multi-trial, multi-list free recall in adults with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD), 16 adults with ASD and 16 matched typical adults learned a first followed by a second categorised list of 24 words. Category labels were provided at encoding,…

Spontaneous classification was assessed using a free serial search task in 18 school-aged children at the high functioning end of the autistic spectrum and compared with results from age-matched typically developing controls. The task required participants to touch shapes in an exhaustive non-repetitive sequence. The positions of the items varied…

This review of the literature on the neuropsychology of autism identifies several consistent findings, such as: existence of neuropsychological impairments in a wide range of domains; large individual differences in certain neuropsychological domains; greater difficulty with tasks involving social information; possible association of the amygdala…

The matching-to-sample performances of three young adults with autism and four children (ages four to nine) without intellectual disabilities were examined in three experiments using complex sample stimuli. Results for all subjects showed that each of two redundant relevant sample elements and their respective comparison stimuli were substitutable…

This prospective study of 17 high-functioning residentially treated adolescents with autism found that cognitive shifting, as measured by card sorting tests, was the only significant factor in predicting progress in social understanding. (Author/JDD)