Detecting where our partners direct their gaze is an important aspect of social interaction. An atypical gaze processing has been reported in autism. However, it remains controversial whether children and adults with autism spectrum disorder interpret indirect gaze direction with typical accuracy. This study investigated whether the detection of…

A study is reported which tests the proposition that faces capture the attention of those with autism spectrum disorders less than a typical population. A visual search task based on the Face-in-the-Crowd paradigm was used to examine the attentional allocation of autism spectrum disorder adults for faces. Participants were required to search for…

Background: The attentional blink (AB) phenomenon was used to assess the effect of emotional information on early visual attention in typically developing (TD) children and children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The AB effect is the momentary perceptual unawareness that follows target identification in a rapid serial visual processing…

Change blindness refers to the difficulty most people find in detecting a difference between two pictures when these are presented successively, with a brief interruption between. Attention at the site of the change is required for detection. A number of studies have investigated change blindness in adults and children with autism spectrum…

ASD subjects are described as showing particular difficulty in decoding emotional patterns. This paper explored linguistic and conceptual skills in response to emotional stimuli presented as emotional faces, scripts (pictures) and interactive situations (videos). Participants with autism, Asperger syndrome and control participants were shown…

To determine whether motor difficulties documented in Asperger's Syndrome (AS) are related to compromised visual abilities, this study examined perception and movement in response to dynamic visual environments. Fourteen males with AS and 16 controls aged 7-23 completed measures of motor skills, postural response to optic flow, and visual…

The aim of the study was to examine the temporal characteristics of information processing in individuals with high-functioning autism and Asperger's disorder using a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm. The results clearly showed that such people demonstrate an attentional blink of similar magnitude to comparison groups. This supports the…

Mentalizing refers to making inferences about other people's mental states, whereas visuospatial perspective taking refers to inferring other people's viewpoints. Both abilities seem vital for social functioning; yet, their exact relationship is unclear. We directly compared mentalizing and visuospatial perspective taking in nineteen adults with…

Using an attentional blink paradigm, we show that the typical enhancement of perception for emotionally arousing events is significantly reduced in Asperger's syndrome (AS) at short inter-target intervals. Control experiments demonstrate that this finding cannot be attributed to differences in the perceived arousal of the stimuli, or to a global…

This study was designed to explore how adults with autism and Asperger syndrome (ASD) would visually process compound figures. They were tested in two tasks, one involving hierarchical global/local stimuli, the other involving face-like or geometrical stimuli where the processing of the inter-elemental spatial relationships was emphasized. Adults…

The performance of eight adults with Asperger syndrome was compared with the performance of controls on a range of perceptual tasks designed to test two models of perceptual deficit: the central coherence deficit model and the hierarchization deficit model. Tentative support for the hierarchization deficit model was demonstrated. (Contains ten…

Several studies have reported that individuals with autism and Asperger's syndrome show a local processing bias on tasks involving features and configurations. This study assessed whether this bias results from differences in the perception of features or a cognitive bias to attend to features in autism as a consequence of a deficit in attending…