Elsevier

Vision Research

Volume 46, Issues 8–9, April 2006, Pages 1242-1252
Vision Research

Spatial and motion integration in children with autism

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2005.10.018Get rights and content
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Abstract

Neuropsychological and psychophysical studies report controversial results regarding local-global visual processing and motion perception in autism. Here, we investigate contour integration and motion perception in an accurately diagnosed sample of autistic children, using low-level psychophysical tasks. We measured detection thresholds for a closed chain of Gabor patches, for different values of inter-element distance and we measured coherency thresholds of optic flow motion stimuli. Both experiments show comparable performances between autistics and normal subjects, demonstrating no evidence of early perceptual integration deficits. Some improvement in performance with age is detected in both groups.

Keywords

Autism
Spatial integration
Motion perception

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