BACKGROUND Understanding and anticipating others' mental or emotional states relies on the processing of social cues, such as dynamic facial expressions. Individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA) may process these cues differently from individuals with typical development (TD) and purportedly use a 'mechanistic' rather than a 'mentalistic' approach, involving rule- and contingency-based in...

Visual-spatial orienting in high-functioning adults with autism and both chronologicaland mental-age normal controls was examined. Three experiments were conducted in which stimuli were presented centrally and~or laterally (left or right of central fixation), and either detection or identification was required. The group with autism differed from normal controls by responding faster to central ...

The expression oftactile defensiveness (Tn) varies among individuals; however, it appears to affect a great number of people with autism. Nevertheless, little research has been conducted to evaluate TD in autism. Past literature regarding touch and typical social development suggests that a relationship between tactile stimulation, or in this case the aversion to this stimuli, and social behavi...

Language in autism has been the subject of intense interest, because communication deficits are central to the disorder, and because autism serves as an arena for testing theories of language acquisition. High-functioning older children with autism are often considered to have intact grammatical abilities, despite pragmatic impairments. Given the heterogeneity in language skills at younger ages...

Data is progressively and robustly accumulating regarding the biological basis of autism. Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are currently considered a group of neurodevelopmental disorders with onset very early in life and a complex, heterogeneous, multifactorial aetiology. A comprehensive search of the last five years of the Medline database was conducted in order to summarize recent evidence on...

Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (VABS) data were examined in a large sample of young children with ASD (n = 290) of varying cognitive levels. IQ was higher than VABS composite score among high functioning children only; the opposite pattern was found in lower IQ subgroups. Profile analysis of VABS domains across cognitive levels demonstrated different profiles in different subgroups. A charac...

The perceptual pattern in autism has been related to either a specific localized processing deficit or a pathway-independent, complexity-specific anomaly. We examined auditory perception in autism using an auditory disembedding task that required spectral and temporal integration. 23 children with high-functioning-autism and 23 matched controls participated. Participants were presented with two...

The supporters of the neurodiversity movement contend that autism is not a mental disorder, but rather natural human variation. In recent paper Jerome Wakefi eld, David Wasserman and Jordan Conrad (2020) argued against this view relying on eld’s harmful dysfunction theory disorder (the HD theory). Although I argue problematic, arguments offered by eld et al. those are plausible, except in one r...

Personal pronouns, such as 'I' and 'you', require a speaker/listener to continuously re-map their reciprocal relation to their referent, depending on who is saying the pronoun. This process, called 'deictic shifting', may underlie the incorrect production of these pronouns, or 'pronoun reversals', such as referring to oneself with the pronoun 'you', which has been reported in children with auti...

Eight males and four females with an Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R) diagnosis of autism (mean age of 16.3 years) and severe intellectual disability (IQ < 40) were individually matched to controls on the basis of chronological age, gender, and nonverbal IQ. The dependent measure was the Diagnostic Assessment for the Severely Handicapped-II, which is used to screen for psychiatric an...