Theories of perceptual decision making have been dominated by the idea that evidence accumulates in favor of different alternatives until some fixed threshold amount is reached, which triggers a decision. Recent theories have suggested that these thresholds may not be fixed during each decision but change as time passes. These collapsing…

One major characteristic of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is problems with social interaction and communication. The present study explored ASD-related alterations in perceiving emotions expressed via body movements. 16 participants with ASD and 16 healthy controls observed video scenes of human interactions conveyed by point-light displays. They…

We investigated the kinds of biological properties that children aged 3-6 years attribute to animals, plants, and artifacts by administering a property attribution task and eliciting explanations for the resulting property attributions. Findings indicated that, from the age of 3 years, children more frequently attribute properties to animals than…

The perception of intent in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) often relies on synthetic animacy displays. This study tests intention perception in ASD via animacy stimuli derived from human motion. Using a forced choice task, 28 participants (14 ASDs; 14 age and verbal-I.Q. matched controls) categorized displays of Chasing, Fighting, Flirting,…

We investigated perception of social and physical causality and animacy in simple motion events, for high-functioning children with autism (CA = 13, VMA = 9.6). Children matched 14 different animations to pictures showing physical, social or non-causality. In contrast to previous work, children with autism performed at a high level similar to…

In individuals with autism or autism-spectrum-disorder (ASD), conflicting results have been reported regarding the processing of biological motion tasks. As biological motion perception and recognition might be related to impaired imitation, gross motor skills and autism specific psychopathology in individuals with ASD, we performed a functional…