A Psychophysical Test of the Visual Pathway of Children with Autism

Abstract

Signal detection psychophysical experiments were conducted to investigate the visual path of children with autism. Computer generated images with Gaussian noise were used. Simple signals, still and in motion were embedded in the background noise. The computer monitor was linearized to properly display the contrast changes. To our knowledge, this is the first time that experiments of this type have been done with observers with autism. Our results show that the visual capabilities of typically developed children were superior to those of the children with autism, and that the related problems of children with autism are sensation related only in a reduced proportion. There is no evidence that they are disabled in detecting simple visual stimuli, still and in motion.

Right Temporoparietal Gray Matter Predicts Accuracy of Social Perception in the Autism Spectrum

“…In accordance with our present finding, other psychophysical data also failed to find global motion processing deficits in ASD (Bertone et al 2005;Del Viva et al 2006;de Jonge et al 2007;Sanchez-Marin and Padilla-Medina, 2008;Vandenbroucke et al 2008;Jones et al 2011). This discrepancy is in accordance with growing evidence that, while common in ASD, abnormalities in motion perception are not universal and may affect only sub-types of individuals with the condition (e.g.…”

Limited activity monitoring in toddlers with autism spectrum disorder

“…First, this deficit might be associated with atypical processing of perceptual aspects of the scene such as contrast and motion. A number of studies in older individuals suggest that low-level perception may be altered in ASD including enhanced sensitivity to spatial contrast (Bertone et al, 2005; McCleery et al, 2007; Sanchez-Marin and Padilla-Medina, 2008; Shic et al, 2007; though see Koh et al, 2010; for reviews see Mottron et al, 2006; Simmons et al, 2009). In this context, the decreased attention to activities may be secondary to increased preference for objects with certain perceptual characteristics within the scene (e.g.…”

Sensory Processing in Autism: A Review of Neurophysiologic Findings

“…Some threshold studies show no difference between ASD individuals and controls in contrast sensitivity for low versus high spatial frequencies or motion/form processing (31, 32). Other visual evoked potential studies indicate that individuals with ASD possess atypical early peaks with impairments in object boundary detection (33), decreased contrast detection ability in both still and moving stimuli at a range of signal/noise ratios (34), and undifferentiated responses for mid and high spatial frequency gratings (35). Local motion processing studies show differences in second order (texture-defined) motion processing but intact first-order (luminance-defined) processing, suggesting difficulties with effective integration of incoming stimuli that is magnified with more nuanced tasks (36).…”