Abstract
Visual perception in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often debated in terms of enhanced local and impaired global perception. Deficits in global motion perception seem to support this characterization, although the evidence is inconsistent. We conducted a large meta-analysis on global motion, combining 48 articles on biological and coherent motion. Results provide evidence for a small global motion processing deficit in individuals with ASD compared to controls in both biological and coherent motion. This deficit appears to be present independent of the paradigm, task, dependent variable, age or IQ of the groups. Results indicate that individuals with ASD are less sensitive to these types of global motion, although the difference in neural mechanisms underlying this behavioral difference remains unclear.
Highlights
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is an early-onset neurodevelopmental condition affecting approximately 1% of the population
As differences in visual performance tasks between individuals with and without ASD are known to depend on the dependent variable in question, i.e., comparable accuracy but longer RT’s for global processing in individuals with ASD compared with typically developing (TD) individuals (e.g., Van der Hallen et al 2015), the type of dependent variable was considered as moderator of the effect
A recent metaanalysis on coherent motion processing in dyslexia found the number of dots to be important (Benassi et al 2010)
Summary
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is an early-onset neurodevelopmental condition affecting approximately 1% of the population. Sensory atypicalities, like hypersensitivity to light (i.e., lights seem overly bright) or hyposensitivity to sounds (i.e., seemingly ignoring someone calling your name) have been found to carry wide-ranging effects on everyday life, including family life and education (e.g., Ashburner et al 2008; Bagby et al 2012; Robertson and Simmons 2015). One sensory modality where atypicalities in ASD have been well-studied is vision (see Simmons et al 2009 for a review). We focus on an important aspect of atypical visual processing in ASD which has received much attention: global motion processing. Atypical global motion processing (Kaiser and Shiffrar 2009) will have marked effects on how an individual perceives and interacts with the world.
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