Children with autism demonstrate early deficits in joint attention and expressions of affect. Interventions to teach joint attention have addressed gaze behavior, gestures, and vocalizations, but have not specifically taught an expression of positive affect such as smiling that tends to occur during joint attention interactions. Intervention was…

Face processing has been studied and discussed in depth during previous decades in several branches of science, and evidence from research supports the view that this process is a highly specialized brain function. Several authors argue that difficulties in the use and comprehension of the information conveyed by human faces could represent a core…

This study was designed to identify specific difficulties and associated features related to the problems with social interaction experienced by individuals with pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS) using an emotion-recognition task. We compared individuals with PDD-NOS or Asperger's disorder (ASP) and typically…

To cooperate with a partner, it is essential to communicate by sharing information through all available avenues, including hand gestures, gazes, head gestures and naturally, speech. In this paper, we compare the communicative and coordination skills of children with typical development to those of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) in…

Background: Children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are known to have an atypical visual perception, with deficits in automatic Gestalt formation and an enhanced processing of visual details. In addition, they are sometimes found to have difficulties in emotion processing. Methods: In three experiments, we investigated whether 7-to-11-year…

The American Psychiatric Association has proposed major revisions for the diagnostic category encompassing Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), which will reportedly increase the specificity and maintain the sensitivity of diagnoses. As a result, the aim of the current study was to compare symptoms of ASD in children and adolescents (N = 208) who met…

Thirty-one, representative, one- to three-year-old children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) were given the MacArthur Communicative Developmental Inventory (CDI) for parent completion and the Reynell Developmental Language Scales III (RDLS) for assessment by a speech and language pathologist. Correspondence across scales was good to excellent,…

Can the disadvantages persons with Asperger syndrome frequently experience with reading facially expressed emotions be attributed to a different visual perception, affecting their scanning patterns? Visual search strategies, particularly regarding the importance of information from the eye area, and the ability to recognise facially expressed…

Children with autism spectrum disorders often exhibit delays in responding to facial expressions, and few studies have examined teaching responding to subtle facial expressions to this population. We used video modeling to train 3 participants with PDD-NOS (age 5) to respond to eight facial expressions: approval, bored, calming, disapproval,…

We reviewed studies that aimed to determine whether behaviors, such as body movements, vocalizations, eye gaze, and facial expressions, served a communicative function for individuals with Rett syndrome. A systematic search identified eight studies, which were summarized in terms of (a) participants, (b) assessment targets, (c) assessment…

This study investigates whether children with Asperger syndrome (AS) show superior competence in creativity, and it examines the relationship between nonverbal creativity and nonverbal IQ and vocabulary size. Sixteen (16) children with AS and forty-two (42) typically developing peers completed the exercises in divergent thinking and feeling from a…

Deficits in executive functioning (EF) have been proposed to underlie the behavioural patterns of individuals with an autism spectrum disorder. Researchers have shown that the Asperger's syndrome (AS) population performs more poorly than typically developing controls on many EF tasks. However, the research literature is inconsistent in identifying…

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are often associated with aberrant responses to sensory stimuli, which are thought to contribute to the social, communication, and repetitive behavior deficits that define ASD. However, there are few studies that separate aberrant sensory responses by individual sensory modality to assess modality-specific…

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…

Several studies, using eye tracking methodology, suggest that different visual strategies in persons with autism spectrum conditions, compared with controls, are applied when viewing facial stimuli. Most eye tracking studies are, however, made in laboratory settings with either static (photos) or non-interactive dynamic stimuli, such as video…