Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have different automatic responses to faces than typically developing (TD) individuals. We recorded visual evoked potentials (VEPs) in 10 individuals with high-functioning ASD (HFASD) and 10 TD individuals. Visual stimuli consisted of upright and inverted faces (fearful and neutral) and objects…

Cognitive processing in autism has been characterized by a difficulty with the abstraction of information across multiple stimuli or situations and subsequent generalization to new stimuli or situations. This apparent difficulty leads to the suggestion that prototype formation, a process of creating a mental summary representation of multiple…

Typically developing toddlers accurately follow an adult's gaze learn object labels. However, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) mis-map new words to their own focus of attention. Children with ASD and typical development participated in three word learning conditions. In the follow-in condition, the adult labeled an object which was…

During writing, perceptual, motor, and cognitive processes interact. This study explored the predictive value of several factors on handwriting quality as well as on speed in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Our results showed that, in this population, age, gender, and visual-motor integration significantly predicted handwriting…

This study investigated metaphor comprehension in a group of 24 Italian high-functioning ASD children (mean age: 8.5 y.). Children were administered a test that was composed of "sensorial metaphors", which are understood by normally developing preschoolers, that the children had to verbally explain. Two normally developing control…

The Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST) is the only cognitive flexibility task that has consistently shown deficits in individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). As this is the only task characterized by limited explicit task instructions and a high degree of disengagement required to perform the switch, we hypothesized that cognitive…

Although executive functions have been widely studied in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), there have been no direct empirical studies of executive abilities in savants with ASD. This study assessed three facets of executive ability (fluency, perseveration and monitoring) in savant artists with ASD, compared to non-talented adults…

Kinematic recordings in a reach and drop task were compared between 12 preschool children with autism without mental retardation and 12 gender and age-matched normally developing children. Our aim was to investigate whether motor anomalies in autism may depend more on a planning ability dysfunction or on a motor control deficit. Planning and…

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of central coherence skills and theory of mind competences in ambiguity detection in adolescents with Asperger syndrome (AS). We sought to pinpoint the level at which AS individuals experience difficulty detecting semantic ambiguity and identify the factors that account for their problems. We…

Using a pre-test, post-test experimental design, effects of a 1-year group leisure program were examined on 31 participants (20 male and 11 female), ages 27-38 (M = 32.05 at start of program), with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis randomly assigned to the experimental condition and a group of 20 adults with ASD randomly assigned to the…

Little is known about the cognitive profiles of high-functioning Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD) in adults based on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale III (WAIS-III). We examined cognitive profiles of adults with no intellectual disability (IQ greater than 70), and in adults with Asperger's disorder (AS; n = 47), high-functioning autism (HFA;…

Children with autism often struggle with executive function (EF) deficits, particularly with regard to working memory (WM). Despite the documented deficits in these areas, very little controlled research has evaluated treatments for remediation of EF or WM deficits in children with autism. This study examined the use of positive reinforcement for…

Clinical intuition and resent research (Senju et al., 2009) suggests that adults with high-functioning autism (HFA) are able to use explicit verbal information but fail to react upon subtle nonverbal cues in order to understand others and navigate social encounters. In order to investigate the relative influence of different domains of socially…

In humans, visual information is processed via parallel channels: the parvocellular (P) pathway analyzes color and form information, whereas the magnocellular (M) stream plays an important role in motion analysis. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often show superior performance in processing fine detail, but impaired performance in…

Atypical development of face processing is a major characteristic in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which could be due to atypical interactions between subcortical and cortical face processing. The current study investigated the saccade planning towards faces in ASD. Seventeen children with ASD and 17 typically developing (TD) children observed a…