Variations in prompt delay procedures are used in discrete-trial training to reduce the occurrence of errors before task mastery. However, the variations are seldom compared systematically. Using an adapted alternating treatments design, the present study compared progressive prompt delay with 2-s or 5-s constant prompt delay, on the acquisition…

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…

Few published studies have systematically compared the efficacy of different prompt-fading methods in the training of complex response chains. The current study systematically compared a most-to-least physical prompt fading hierarchy with a most-to-least vocal prompt fading strategy in the training of four arbitrary Tinkertoy® construction tasks…

43 typically-developed adults and 35 adults with ASD performed a cartoon faux pas test. Adults with ASD apparently over-detected faux pas despite good comprehension abilities, and were generally slower at responding. Signal detection analysis demonstrated that the ASD participants had significantly greater difficulty detecting whether a cartoon…

Children with autism spectrum disorder present with a variety of social communication deficits such as atypicalities in social gaze and verbal and non-verbal communication delays as well as perceptuo-motor deficits like motor incoordination and dyspraxia. In this study, we had the unique opportunity to study praxis performance in deaf children…

Background: Youth diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often show deficits in cognitive control processes, potentially contributing to characteristic difficulties monitoring and regulating behavior. Modification of performance following conflict can be measured by examining conflict adaptation, the adjustment of cognitive resources based…

Background: The phenomenon of change blindness illustrates that a limited number of items within the visual scene are attended to at any one time. It has been suggested that individuals with autism focus attention on less contextually relevant aspects of the visual scene, show superior perceptual discrimination and notice details which are often…

Language in autism has been the subject of intense interest, because communication deficits are central to the disorder, and because autism serves as an arena for testing theories of language acquisition. High-functioning older children with autism are often considered to have intact grammatical abilities, despite pragmatic impairments. Given the…

Previous studies have reported working memory deficits in autism, but this finding has been inconsistent. One possibility is that deficits in this domain may be present only when working memory load exceeds some limited capacity. High-functioning individuals with autism performed the CANTAB computerized test of spatial working memory. Individuals…

Decision-making is an important function that can be quantified using a two-choice prediction task. Individuals with Autistic Disorder (AD) often show highly restricted and repetitive behavior that may interfere with adaptive decision-making. We assessed whether AD adults showed repetitive behavior on the choice task that was unaffected by…

Perspective-taking, or the ability to demonstrate awareness of informational states in oneself and in others, has been of recent interest in behavioral psychology. This is, in part, a result of a modern behavioral approach to human language and cognition known as Relational Frame Theory, which views perspective-taking as generalized operant…

Language delay and impairment are salient features of autism. More specifically, there is evidence of atypical semantic organization in autism, but the functional brain correlates are not well understood. The current study used functional MRI to examine activation associated with semantic category decision. Ten high-functioning men with autism…