title: Slow motor responses to visual stimuli of low salience in autism.
abstract: The authors studied 2 tasks that placed differing demands on detecting relevant visual information and generating appropriate gaze shifts in adults and children with and without autism. In Experiment 1, participants fixated a cross and needed to make large gaze shifts, but researchers provided explicit instructions about shifting. Children with autism were indistinguishable from comparison groups in this top-down task. In Experiment 2 (bottom-up), a fixation cross remained or was removed prior to the presentation of a peripheral target of low visual salience. In this gap-effect experiment, children with autism showed lengthened reaction times overall but no specific deficit in overlap trials. The results show evidence of a general deficit in manual responses to visual stimuli of low salience and no evidence of a deficit in top-down attention shifting. Older children with autism appeared able to generate appropriate motor responses, but stimulus-driven visual attention seemed impaired.
authors.affiliation: College of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Aberdeen, Scotland.
authors.forename: Jessica
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Todd
authors.forename: Charlotte
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Mills
authors.forename: Andrew D
authors.initials: AD
authors.lastname: Wilson
authors.forename: Mandy S
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Plumb
authors.forename: Mark A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Mon-Williams
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001321:Autistic Disorder / Q000503:physiopathology*; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005364:Field Dependence-Independence; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology*; D012016:Reference Values; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult