When observing other people during naturally paced and dynamic interactions, it is essential to look at specific locations at the right time to extract a maximum of socially informative content. In this study, we aimed to investigate the looking behavior of typically developing toddlers and toddlers later diagnosed with autism when observing other…

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 delineate the sequence that typically developing infants pass tasks that assess different early social cognitive skills considered precursors to theory-of-mind abilities. We compared this normative sequence to performance on these tasks in a group of autistic (AUT) children. 86 infants were administered seven tasks assessing "intention…

Visual disengagement has been hypothesized as an endophenotype for autism. In this study we used twin modelling to assess the role of genetics in basic measures of visual disengagement, and tested their putative association to autistic traits in the general population. We used the Gap Overlap task in a sample of 492 twins. Results showed that most…

Autistic individuals have shown superior performance in simple, albeit difficult, visual search tasks. We compared eye movements and behavioral markers across two visual search tasks based on real-world scenes in young adults. Context-aided search increased speed and accuracy for all groups. Autistic adults (n = 29) were on average consistently…

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…

Reading monitoring is poorly explored, but it may have an impact on well-documented reading comprehension difficulties in autism. This study explores reading monitoring through the impact of instructions and different error types on reading behavior. Individuals with autism and matched controls read correct sentences and sentences containing…

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…

We examined the factors that influence ocular fixation control in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) including sensory information, individuals' motor characteristics, and inhibitory control. The ASD group showed difficulty in maintaining fixation especially when there was no fixation target. The fixational eye movement characteristics of…

We examined processing of verbal irony in three groups of children: (1) 18 children with high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (HFASD), (2) 18 typically-developing children, matched to the first group for verbal ability, and (3) 18 typically-developing children matched to the first group for chronological age. We utilized an irony…

We examined the ability to use static line drawings of eye gaze cues to orient visual-spatial attention in children with high functioning autism (HFA) compared to typically developing children (TD). The task was organized such that on "valid trials," gaze cues were directed toward the same spatial location as the appearance of an upcoming target,…

The finding that relatives of individuals with autism show mild autistic traits is referred to as the broader autism phenotype (BAP). In the current study, 25 parents with a child with high-functioning autism and 25 parents with typically developed children were compared on: (1) the Block Design Test, (2) the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ), and (3)…

Subjects with PDD excel on certain visuo-spatial tasks, amongst which visual search tasks, and this has been attributed to enhanced perceptual discrimination. However, an alternative explanation is that subjects with PDD show a different, more effective search strategy. The present study aimed to test both hypotheses, by measuring eye movements…