The present study explored the relationship between biological motion (BioM) processing, motor skills, and autistic traits within a non-clinical sample of 621 adults (18-73 years, 51.8% female). Results indicated that adults with greater autistic traits also endorsed difficulties associated with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) in…

Sensory processing difficulties affect the development of sensorimotor skills in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, the effect of sensory information on postural control is unclear in the ASD adult population. The present study examined the effect of visual information on postural control as well as the attentional demands…

Autism is associated with differences in sensory processing and motor coordination. Evidence from electroencephalography suggests individual perturbation evoked response (PER) components represent specific aspects of postural disturbance processing; P1 reflects the detection and N1 reflects the evaluation of postural instability. Despite the…

Sensory hypersensitivity and insistence on sameness (I/S) are common, co-occurring features of autism, yet the relationship between them is poorly understood. This study assessed the impact of sensory hypersensitivity on the clinical symptoms of specific phobia, separation anxiety, social anxiety and I/S for autistic and typically developing (TD)…

Humans segment the continuous stream of sensory information into distinct events at points of change. Between 2 events, humans perceive an event boundary. Present theories propose changes in the sensory information to trigger updating processes of the present event model. Increased encoding effort finally leads to a memory benefit at event…

Impairments in postural control affect the development of motor and social skills in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This review compared the effect of different sensory conditions on static standing postural control between ASD and neurotypical individuals. Results from 19 studies indicated a large difference in postural control…

We live in a multisensory world and one of the challenges the brain is faced with is deciding what information belongs together. Our ability to make assumptions about the relatedness of multisensory stimuli is partly based on their temporal and spatial relationships. Stimuli that are proximal in time and space are likely to be bound together by…

Although children with language impairments, including those associated with reading, usually demonstrate deficits in phonological processing, there is minimal agreement as to the source of those deficits. This study examined two problems hypothesized to be possible sources: either poor auditory sensitivity to speech-relevant acoustic properties,…

Autism involves various perceptual benefits and deficits, but it is unclear if the disorder also involves anomalous audiovisual integration. To address this issue, we compared the performance of high-functioning adults with autism and matched controls on experiments investigating the audiovisual integration of speech, spatiotemporal relations, and…

This study examined iconic gesture comprehension in autism, with the goal of assessing whether cross-modal processing difficulties impede speech-and-gesture integration. Participants were 19 adolescents with high functioning autism (HFA) and 20 typical controls matched on age, gender, verbal IQ, and socio-economic status (SES). Gesture…

The immediate recall is compared of 15 speech concepts presented in mixed order in 3 modalities: auditory, symbolically visual (written), and iconic. Results of experiments with 121 subjects suggest that the first step of information processing is a differentiation of sensory stimuli. (10 references) (LB)

Ten normally speaking children, 10 having mild misarticulations, and 10 having severe misarticulations, aged seven-eight, were administered unisensory and bisensory processing tasks. Results showed that misarticulating children obtained lower scores than normal children on all bisensory tasks and had larger decrements from unisensory to bisensory…

After distinguishing between neocortical abilities for executive control and subcortical sensory motor skills for proprioceptive and vestibular integration, we compare a sample of 116 normal preschoolers with a sample of 31 preschoolers receiving occupational therapeutical treatment. This is done in an experimental design controlled for age (mean:…