Abstract
In addition to its core social deficits, autism is characterized by altered visual perception, with a preference for local percept in those high in autistic tendency. Here, the balance of global vs. local percepts for the perceptually rivalrous diamond illusion was assessed between groups scoring high and low on the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ). The global percept of a diamond shape oscillating horizontally behind three occluders can as easily be interpreted as the local percept of four line elements, each moving vertically. Increasing the luminance contrast of the occluders with respect to background resulted in an increase of initial global percept in both groups, with no difference in sensitivity between groups. Presenting the target further into the periphery resulted in a marked increase in the percentage of global perception with visual field eccentricity. However, while the performance for centrally presented diamond targets was not different between AQ groups, the peripheral global performance of the High AQ group was significantly reduced compared with the Low AQ group. On the basis of other imaging studies, this peripheral but not foveal global perceptual neglect may indicate an abnormal interaction between striate cortex and the Lateral Occipital Complex (LOC), or to differences in the deployment of attention between the two groups.
Highlights
Autism (American Psychiatric Association, 2000) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), as clinically diagnosed (American Psychiatric Association, 2013), are characterized by impaired social communication and interaction and by restricted or inflexible and often repetitive behaviors
OCCLUDER CONTRAST TASK Both High Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) and Low AQ groups showed an increase in initial global percept as the occluding screen was more readily revealed through luminance contrast with respect to the background
While the results demonstrated a significant relationship between the Michelson contrast of the occluders and percent global percept, they show that High AQ and Low AQ groups perform in a very similar fashion
Summary
Autism (American Psychiatric Association, 2000) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), as clinically diagnosed (American Psychiatric Association, 2013), are characterized by impaired social communication and interaction and by restricted or inflexible and often repetitive behaviors. Children and adults with high functioning ASD have been reported to show superior performance in the recognition of hidden figures, attention to detail in visual search, and in the discrimination of novel stimuli (Plaisted et al, 1998a,b) compared with controls. This is at the expense of certain motion sensitivities and global or gestalt perception (Happe and Frith, 2006). They based their conclusions on a poorer second order motion sensitivity motion defined by progressive contrast change rather than luminance change: (Bertone et al, 2003, 2005) and on mixed results regarding simple first order motion coherence threshold deficits (Spencer et al, 2000; Milne et al, 2002; Bertone et al, 2003) and unimpaired flicker contrast sensitivity (Pellicano et al, 2005)
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