In the current study, storytelling and story retelling by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were analyzed to explore ambiguous third-person pronoun use in narratives. Twenty-three children diagnosed with ASD aged 6;1 to 14;3 and 17 typically-developing (TD) children aged 5;11 to 14;4 participated in the study. In the retelling task, no significant difference between the groups was fo...

Eye-tracking studies in young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have shown a visual attention preference for geometric patterns when viewing paired dynamic social images (DSIs) and dynamic geometric images (DGIs). In the present study, eye-tracking of two different paired presentations of DSIs and DGIs was monitored in a group of 13 children aged 4 to 6 years with ASD and 20 chronolo...

This study investigated a novel approach to obtaining data on parent and infant emotion during the Face-to-Face/Still-Face paradigm, and examined these data in light of previous findings regarding early autism risk. One-hundred and eighty eight non-expert students rated 38 parents and infant siblings of children who did (20) or did not (18) have autism spectrum disorders. Ratings averaged acros...

Studies of supervised Categorization have demonstrated limited Categorization performance in participants with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), however little research has been conducted regarding unsupervised Categorization in this population. This study explored unsupervised Categorization using two stimulus sets that differed in their difficulty of Categorization according to the simplicity ...

Previous studies have demonstrated that angry faces capture humans' attention more rapidly than emotionally positive faces. This phenomenon is referred to as the anger superiority effect (ASE). Despite atypical emotional processing, adults and children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have been reported to show ASE as well as typically developed (TD) individuals. So far, however, few studie...

We examined upper facial basic emotion recognition in 57 subjects with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) (M = 13.5 years) and 33 typically developing controls (M = 14.3 years) by using a standardized computer-aided measure (The Frankfurt Test and Training of Facial Affect Recognition, FEFA). The ASD group scored lower than controls on the total scores of FEFA and perceived ambiguous stimuli more ...

The World Wide Web is a common method for obtaining information on autism spectrum disorders, however, there are no guidelines for finding websites with high quality. We conducted two studies examining the characteristics and/or quality of autism websites in 2009 and 2010. We found websites with a .gov top-level domain had a statistically significant association with high quality websites and w...

The present study compares the effects of providing choice between activities or between materials for completion of activities on the on-task behavior of 4 boys with autism spectrum disorders. Results showed that the participants displayed higher levels of on-task behavior during the choice conditions than in the no-choice condition. However, the type of choice opportunity did not seem to have...