Although superior visual search skills have been repeatedly reported for individuals with autism spectrum disorder, the underlying mechanisms remain controversial. To specify the locus where individuals with autism spectrum disorder excel in visual search, we compared the performance of autism spectrum disorder adults and healthy controls in…

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…

Recent studies have suggested that children with autism perform better than matched controls on visual search tasks and that this stems from a superior visual discrimination ability. This study assessed whether these findings generalize from children to adults with autism. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that, like children, adults with autism were…