E-Motion mis-sight and other temporal processing disorders in autism

We thank Elizabeth Milne, John Swettenham and Ruth Campbell for their review on a new important topic in neuropsychology of autistic spectrum disorders (ASD), i.e., visual-motion processing (Milne et al., 2005). They give us the opportunity to precise several points and to complete our own view on this topic. As they say, our group was the first to investigate motion perception in autistic children, with a visuo-postural paradigm : this reflex-paradigm was particularly adapted to investigate children with low-functioning autism (LFA), since no verbal or voluntary motor answer were required for exploring basic ‘low level’ optic flow – processing in these subjects. These children with LFA that we meet in chid day-care psychiatric units force us – cliniciansresearchers not only to understand their neuropsychological impairments, but also to help them here-and-now, and help their bewildered parents (Tardif & Gepner, 2003). Thus, another difference between clinicians-researchers and researchers is that the former generally try to investigate not only high-functioning autism but also low-functioning autism. Thus, their view on subjects with ASD is not only based on their high-order cognitive peculiarities but also involves their low level perceptual impairments.