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…

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 measured skin conductance response (SCR) to escalating levels of a direct social threat from a novel, ecologically-relevant experimental paradigm, the Intruder Threat Task. We simultaneously evaluated the contribution of social symptom severity and behavioral movement. Children with AS group showed less psychophysiological reactivity to social…

The anthropomorphic bias describes the finding that the perceived naturalness of a biological motion decreases as the human-likeness of a computer-animated agent increases. To investigate the anthropomorphic bias in autistic children, human or cartoon characters were presented with biological and artificial motions side by side on a touchscreen.…

Two studies investigated whether typically developing children (TD) and children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) were able to decide whether two characters were communicating or not on the basis of point-light displays. Point-lights portrayed actors engaged or not in a social interaction. In study 1, TD children (4-10 years old; n = 36)…

Cognitive control dysfunctions, like inhibitory and attentional flexibility deficits are assumed to underlie repetitive behavior in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In the present study, prepotent response inhibition and attentional flexibility were examined in 64 high-functioning individuals with ASD and 53 control participants.…

Preferential attention to biological motion can be seen in typically developing infants in the first few days of life and is thought to be an important precursor in the development of social communication. We examined whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) aged 3-7 years preferentially attend to point-light displays depicting…

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…

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder are vulnerable to anxiety. Repetitive behaviours are a core feature of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and have been associated with anxiety. This study examined repetitive behaviours and anxiety in two groups of children with autism spectrum disorder, those with high anxiety and those with lower levels of…

Joint attention intervention for children with autism spectrum disorders was focused on improving joint engagement and joint attention skills. The purpose of this study was to develop a caregiver-mediated joint engagement intervention program combined with body movement play to investigate the effects of joint engagement/joint attention skills in…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who have native exposure to a sign language such as American Sign Language (ASL) have received almost no scientific attention. This paper reports the first studies on a sample of five native-signing children (four deaf children of deaf parents and one hearing child of deaf parents; ages 4;6 to 7;5)…

A randomized pretest-posttest control group design was utilized to measure the effects of a platform swing on independent work behaviors of 30 children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Participants engaged in two 5-min intervals of independent work. Between the intervals, participants in the treatment group received 5 min of vestibular…

From the 1970s on, case studies reported the effectiveness of therapeutic mirroring in movement with children with autism spectrum disorder. In this feasibility study, we tested a dance movement therapy intervention based on mirroring in movement in a population of 31 young adults with autism spectrum disorder (mainly high-functioning 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…

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)…