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Spatial Frequency Priming of Scene Perception in Adolescents With and Without ASD

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Abstract

While most typically developing (TD) participants have a coarse-to-fine processing style, people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) seem to be less globally and more locally biased when processing visual information. The stimulus-specific spatial frequency content might be directly relevant to determine this temporal hierarchy of visual information processing in people with and without ASD. We implemented a semantic priming task in which (in)congruent coarse and/or fine spatial information preceded target categorization. Our results indicated that adolescents with ASD made more categorization errors than TD adolescents and needed more time to process the prime stimuli. Simultaneously, however, our findings argued for a processing advantage in ASD, when the prime stimulus contains detailed spatial information and presentation time permits explicit visual processing.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO) to Steven Vanmarcke and long-term structural funding by the Flemish Government (METH/14/02) to Johan Wagemans. We would like to thank all participants for their time and contribution to this research.

Author contributions

SV conceived of the study, participated in its design, coordination, measurement and analysis. He also drafted the manuscript; IN participated in the design and interpretation of the data; JS participated in the design and interpretation of the data; JW participated in the design, analysis and interpretation of the data. All authors read, commented and approved the final manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Brain and Cognition, University of Leuven (KU Leuven), 3000, Leuven, Belgium

    Steven Vanmarcke & Johan Wagemans

  2. Leuven Autism Research (LAuRes), KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Steven Vanmarcke, Ilse Noens, Jean Steyaert & Johan Wagemans

  3. Parenting and Special Education Research Unit, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Ilse Noens

  4. Department of Child Psychiatry, UPC-KU Leuven, Kortenberg, Belgium

    Jean Steyaert

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  1. Steven Vanmarcke
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  2. Ilse Noens
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Correspondence to Steven Vanmarcke.

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Informed consent was obtained from both the participants themselves and their parents before onset of the experiment.

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Vanmarcke, S., Noens, I., Steyaert, J. et al. Spatial Frequency Priming of Scene Perception in Adolescents With and Without ASD. J Autism Dev Disord 47, 2023–2038 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3123-3

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