title: Spatial and motion integration in children with autism.
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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Florence, via S. Niccolò, 93, 50125 Florence, Italy. michela@in.cnr.it
authors.forename: Maria Michela
authors.initials: MM
authors.lastname: Del Viva
authors.forename: Roberta
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Igliozzi
authors.forename: Raffaella
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Tancredi
authors.forename: Daniela
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Brizzolara
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001321:Autistic Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D005556:Form Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D009039:Motion Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011601:Psychophysics