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Visual completion and complexity of visual shape in children with pervasive developmental disorder

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Abstract

Much evidence has been gathered for differences in visual perceptual processing in individuals with Autistic Spectrum Disorder. The presence of the fundamental process of visual completion was tested in a group of children with Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD), as this requires perceptually integrating visual structure into wholes. In Experiment 1, it was investigated whether visual completion is present for simple partly occluded shapes in a group of children with PDD and a typically developing group. In Experiment 2, the presence of contextual influences in visual completion was investigated for the two groups. A total of 19 children with PDD and 28 controls who were matched for chronological age and IQ took part in two primed-matching tasks. For both groups, visual completion was present and for both groups, contextual influences were found to be dominant in this process. However, only for the group with PDD no priming effects (PEs) were found from less regular primes on congruent test pairs. The group with PDD did integrate visual information into wholes and did this in a contextually dependent way. However, for more complex shapes, visual completion is weaker for this group.

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Acknowledgements

TdW was funded by the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research (NWO) on a project awarded to RvL, WS by the Foundation for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry East Netherlands (SKJPON, Stichting Kinder- en Jeugdpsychiatrie Oost Nederland) and RvL received a grant from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, Ilse Groenendaal en Anne Monsuwe for their assistance in testing the children and of course all children, their parents and schools for their invaluable help.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Psychiatry Department, Neuro Sensoric Cluster, Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, P.O. Box 9101, 6500, HB, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Tessa C.J. de Wit

  2. Herlaarhof, Centre for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Boxtelseweg 32, P.O. Box 10150, 5260, GB, Vught, The Netherlands

    Wim A.J.M. Schlooz

  3. Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9104, 6500, HE, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Wouter Hulstijn & Rob van Lier

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  1. Tessa C.J. de Wit
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  2. Wim A.J.M. Schlooz
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  3. Wouter Hulstijn
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  4. Rob van Lier
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Correspondence to Tessa C.J. de Wit.

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de Wit, T.C., Schlooz, W.A., Hulstijn, W. et al. Visual completion and complexity of visual shape in children with pervasive developmental disorder. Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry 16, 168–177 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00787-006-0585-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00787-006-0585-9

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