How do we decide whether a statement is literally true? Here, we contrast participants' eventual evaluations of a speaker's meaning with the real-time processes of comprehension. We record participants' eye movements as they respond to potentially misleading instructions to click on one of two objects which might be concealing treasure ("the…

We explored the role of negative performance beliefs and self-focused attention considered central to psychological models of social anxiety but not studied in autism. Firstly, we compared self- and observer ratings of performance on a social task for 71 young autistic people, 41 high and 30 low in social anxiety, finding a significant main effect…

The role of relative salience in processing of hierarchical stimuli in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was examined in this study. Participants with ASD and typically developing controls performed a Navon letters task under conditions of global salience, local salience or equal salience of both levels. Results revealed no group…

The present study evaluates the test-retest reliability of six theory of mind (ToM) tasks that measured cognitive, affective, and spontaneous ToM in 7 to 11 year-old children with autism spectrum disorder. Our results revealed considerable variation in test-retest reliability depending on the type of ToM task, which ranged from poor to good with…

Inconsistent data are available on mental rotation performance in neurotypicals with high autistic-like traits. Here, we tested whether global-local visual processing abilities mediate the influence of specific autistic-like trait domains (social skill, attention switching, attention-to-detail, communication, and imagination) on mental rotation.…

Individuals with ASD have been shown to have different pattern of functional connectivity. In this study, brain activity of participants with many and few autistic traits, was recorded using an fNIRS device, as participants preformed an interpersonal synchronization task. This type of task involves synchronization and functional connectivity of…

Past research suggested that, due to difficulties in mentalistic reasoning, individuals with autism tend to base their moral judgments on the outcome of agents' actions rather than on agents' intentions. In a novel task, aimed at reducing the processing demands required to represent intentions and generate a judgment, autistic children were…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit disordered speech prosody, but sources of disordered prosody remain poorly understood. We explored patterns of temporal alignment and prosodic grouping in a speech-based metronome repetition task as well as manual coordination in a drum tapping task among Cantonese speakers with ASD and…

Despite evidence suggesting differences in early event-related potential (ERP) responses to social emotional stimuli, little is known about later stage ERP contributions to social emotional processing in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Adults with and without ASD completed a facial emotion recognition task involving stimuli that…

Typically developing adults with low and high Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) scores made rapid social evaluations of neutral faces when these were primed by briefly presented emotional faces. High AQ participants rated neutral faces as more threatening than low AQ participants, regardless of the prime condition. Both groups rated target neutral…

Previous research suggests that Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) might be associated with impairments on implicit but not explicit mentalizing tasks. However, such comparisons are made difficult by the heterogeneity of stimuli and the techniques used to measure mentalizing capabilities. We tested the abilities of 34 individuals (17 with ASD) to…

Contrasting reports of "reduced" and "intact" sensitivity to coherent motion in autistic individuals may be attributable to stimulus parameters. Here, we investigated whether dot lifetime contributes to elevated thresholds in children with autism. We presented a standard motion coherence task to 31 children with autism and 31…

Special ability in computing the day of week for given dates was observed in a 24 year-old male (FB) diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. FB performed almost flawlessly (98.2%) both with past and future dates, over a span of 40 years. Response latency was slower as temporal remoteness of future dates increased. Within the future timespan, FB's…

Frith's original notion of 'weak central coherence' suggested that increased local processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) resulted from reduced global processing. More recent accounts have emphasised superior local perception and suggested intact global integration. However, tasks often place local and global processing in direct trade-off,…

In comparison to typically developing (TD) individuals, people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) appear to be worse in the fast extraction of the global meaning of a situation or picture. Ultra-rapid categorization [paradigm developed by Thorpe et al. ("Nature" 381:520-522, 1996)] involves such global information processing. We…