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Exploring Perceptual Skills in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: From Target Detection to Dynamic Perceptual Discrimination

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An Erratum to this article was published on 10 November 2013

Abstract

Perceptual processing in autism is associated with both ‘strengths’ and ‘weaknesses’ but within a literature that varies widely in terms of the assessments used. We report data from 12 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 12 age and IQ matched neurotypical controls tested on a set of tasks using the same stimuli throughout but systematically changing in difficulty. These tasks ranged through simple detection of stimulus onset to pairwise size discrimination across two approaching targets. Children with ASD were slower than controls even in simple detection tasks, but this did not explain further group differences found in the size discrimination of approaching targets. The results are discussed in terms of impairments in speed of responding in ASD under certain conditions of visuomotor coupling, stimulus presentation and increased information processing demands.

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Notes

  1. We do not use this term in the same sense as Greenaway and Plaisted (2005) and reserve it for describing a stimulus under continuous change.

  2. Although the processing of and attending to faces has been found to be problematic in ASD, Rosset et al. (2008) found that ASD and TD children respond in similar ways to cartoon faces.

  3. Full counterbalancing of all variables manipulated in the videos produced too many possible combinations.

  4. No participants were deemed outliers according to task accuracy.

  5. These two participants were not unusual with respect to IQ relative to the rest of their respective group.

  6. Effect size estimates were calculated by dividing the Mann–Whitney U statistic by the product of the two group sample sizes.

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Acknowledgments

The first author would like to acknowledge a Kerr-Fry Award in support of the MSc from which this work originated. We would also like to thank all of the participants and their families and schools.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, 7 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9JZ, UK

    Louisa Miller & Maggie McGonigle-Chalmers

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  1. Louisa Miller
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  2. Maggie McGonigle-Chalmers
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Correspondence to Louisa Miller.

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Miller, L., McGonigle-Chalmers, M. Exploring Perceptual Skills in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: From Target Detection to Dynamic Perceptual Discrimination. J Autism Dev Disord 44, 1144–1157 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-013-1977-6

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