title: Individual differences in visual search: relationship to autistic traits, discrimination thresholds, and speed of processing.
abstract: Enhanced visual search is widely reported in autism. Here we note a similar advantage for university students self-reporting higher levels of autism-like traits. Contrary to prevailing theories of autism, performance was not associated with perceptual-discrimination thresholds for the same stimuli, but was associated with inspection-time threshold--a measure of speed of perceptual processing. Enhanced visual search in autism may, therefore, at least partially be explained by faster speed of processing.
authors.affiliation: ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia. jon.brock@mq.edu.au
authors.forename: Jon
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Brock
authors.forename: Jing Y
authors.initials: JY
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.forename: Kevin R
authors.initials: KR
authors.lastname: Brooks
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D002648:Child; D002659:Child Development Disorders, Pervasive / Q000523:psychology*; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011930:Reaction Time; D012684:Sensory Thresholds; D055815:Young Adult