07-07-2017 | Original Paper | Uitgave 10/2017
Open Access
The Integration of Occlusion and Disparity Information for Judging Depth in Autism Spectrum Disorder
- Tijdschrift:
-
Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders
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Uitgave 10/2017
- Auteurs:
- Danielle Smith, Danielle Ropar, Harriet A. Allen
Abstract
In autism spectrum disorder (ASD), atypical integration of visual depth cues may be due to flattened perceptual priors or selective fusion. The current study attempts to disentangle these explanations by psychophysically assessing within-modality integration of ordinal (occlusion) and metric (disparity) depth cues while accounting for sensitivity to stereoscopic information. Participants included 22 individuals with ASD and 23 typically developing matched controls. Although adults with ASD were found to have significantly poorer stereoacuity, they were still able to automatically integrate conflicting depth cues, lending support to the idea that priors are intact in ASD. However, dissimilarities in response speed variability between the ASD and TD groups suggests that there may be differences in the perceptual decision-making aspect of the task.