Research is equivocal on whether attention orienting is atypical in autism. This study investigated two types of attention orienting in autistic people and accounted for the potential confounders of alerting level, co-occurring symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and anxiety, age, and sex. Twenty-seven autistic participants…

Individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who engage in stereotypy may also emit a prior, temporally contiguous, high-risk response to access stereotypic behaviors. For example, the participant in this study who was diagnosed with ASD engaged in a chained response that included elopement, often in unsafe locations, to access light…

Enhanced low-level perception, although present in individuals with autism, is not seen in individuals with high, but non-clinical, levels of autistic traits (Brock et al.in "Percept Lond" 40(6):739. doi:10.1068/p6953, 2011). This is surprising, as many of the higher-level visual differences found in autism have been shown to correlate…

Stimulus overselectivity is widely accepted as a stimulus control abnormality in autism spectrum disorders and subsets of other populations. Previous research has demonstrated a link between both chronological and mental age and overselectivity in typical development. However, the age at which children are developmentally ready to respond to…

Autistic and typical children mastered a simultaneous discrimination task with three sets of all-tactile compound stimuli. During training, responding to one stimulus (S+) resulted in rewards whereas responding to the alternative (S-) was extinguished. Test 1 was conducted with recombinations of S+ and S- elements. In Test 2, the test stimulus to…

The conditions under which stimulus over-selectivity occurred were studied using a matching-to-sample procedure with non-autistic adults. A matching-to-sample discrimination learning task with a number of sample-comparison retention intervals was used. The results demonstrated that an increase in retention interval increased the degree of stimulus…

Ten autistic children and 10 normal nursery school children, matched for mean developmental age, were presented with figure stimuli and had variable irrelevant cues in two-choice simultaneous discrimination learning. Performance of the autistic group did not vary as a function of irrelevant variability, a result attributed to poor performance of…

Statistically, haloperidol was significantly superior to placebo in reducing behavioral symptoms. In a discrimination learning paradigm, autistic children receiving haloperidol learned the discrimination while those on placebo did not. Discrimination attained on haloperidol was retained when the children were switched to placebo. (Author)

The results showed that the performance of the autistic children was better than the other two groups on concrete discrimination tasks, was poorer than the other two groups on formal discrimination tasks, and the quality of the autistic children's performance decreased as task requirements for formal discrimination increased. (Author/SB)

Global-local processing was examined in high-functioning children with autism and in groups of typically developing children. In experiment 1, the effects of structural bias were tested by comparing visual search that favored access to either local or global targets. The children with autism were not unusually sensitive to either level of visual…

The double-blind and placebo controlled study with 45 autistic children (ages 2-7) found that the drug, haloperidol, showed powerful therapeutic effects in reducing behavioral symptoms when administered for 4 weeks at doses raging from 0.25 to 4.0 milligrams/day. Learning effects were not found. (Author/DB)

A procedure (either computerized or manual) designed to assess the discrimination learning thresholds of low functioning psychotic and retarded children is described. (Author)

Recent studies have suggested that unusual visual processing in autism might stem from enhanced visual discrimination. Although there are also many anecdotal reports of auditory and tactile processing disturbances in autism these have received comparatively little attention. It is possible that the enhanced discrimination ability in vision in…