The current study examined eye movement control in autistic (ASD) children. Simple targets were presented in isolation, or with central, parafoveal, or peripheral distractors synchronously. Sixteen children with ASD (47-81 months) and nineteen age and IQ matched typically developing children were instructed to look to the target as accurately and…

A common example of social differences in autism spectrum disorder is poor modulation of reciprocal gaze, including reduced duration of eye contact and difficulty detecting the aim of another's gaze. It remains unclear, however, whether such differences are specific to the social domain, or are instead indicative of broader alterations in…

To test a central assumption of the increased perceptual capacity account in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), the effects of perceptual load and target-stimulus degradation on auditory detection sensitivity were contrasted. Fourteen adolescents with ASD and 16 neurotypical controls performed a visual letter search task under three…

The social communicative deficits and repetitive behaviours seen in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) may be affected by altered stimulus salience and reward attribution. The present study used eye tracking and a behavioural measure to index effort expenditure, arousal, and attention, during viewing of images depicting social scenes and…

Recent work on visual selective attention has shown that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) demonstrate an increased perceptual capacity. The current study examined whether increasing visual perceptual load also has less of an effect on auditory awareness in children with ASD. Participants performed either a high- or low load version…

A study is reported which tests the proposition that faces capture the attention of those with autism spectrum disorders less than a typical population. A visual search task based on the Face-in-the-Crowd paradigm was used to examine the attentional allocation of autism spectrum disorder adults for faces. Participants were required to search for…

Despite well-documented attention deficits in children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), distinctions across types of attention problems and their association with academic attainment has not been fully explored. This study examines visual attention capacities and inattentive/hyperactive behaviours in 77 children aged 4 to…

Prosaccade and antisaccade errors in the context of social and nonsocial stimuli were investigated in youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 19) a matched control sample (n = 19), and a small sample of youth with obsessive compulsive disorder (n = 9). Groups did not differ in error rates in the prosaccade condition for any stimulus…

In this study, the looking behavior of 16 autistic and 14 non-autistic children toward cartoon-like scenes that included a human figure was measured quantitatively using an infrared eye-tracking device. Fixation behavior of autistic children was similar to that of their age-and IQ-matched normal peers. Results do not support the idea that autistic…

A visual orienting task was given to 11 high functioning male adolescents and adults with autism. Findings suggested that autistic people have difficulty processing briefly presented cue information and problems disengaging and shifting attention within the visual modality. Results support previous ideas that attentional dysfunction may underlie…

Background: This study investigated whether another person's social attention, specifically the direction of their eye gaze, and a non-social directional cue, an arrow, triggered reflexive orienting in children with and without autism in an experimental situation. Methods: Children with autism and typically developed children participated in one…

Background: The aim of this study was to investigate attention orienting triggered by another's gaze direction in autism. Method: Twelve high-functioning children with autism and gender- and age-matched normal control children were studied using two tasks. In the first task, children were asked to detect laterally presented target stimuli preceded…

This study, involving a 10-year-old child with cerebral palsy and autism, found that the use of headphones resulted in an increase in on-task behavior whether stimuli were presented in an audiovisual mode, an audio-only mode, or a visual-only mode. Preference was for the auditory only or the mixed audiovisual stimuli. (DB)