Slow motor responses to visual stimuli of low salience in autism. Todd, J., Mills, C., Wilson, A., D., Plumb, M., S., & Mon-Williams, M., a. Journal of motor behavior, 41(5):419-26, 2009.
Slow motor responses to visual stimuli of low salience in autism. [pdf]Paper  Slow motor responses to visual stimuli of low salience in autism. [link]Website  abstract   bibtex   
The authors studied 2 tasks that placed differing demands on detecting relevant visual information and generating appropriate gaze shifts in adults and children with and without autism. In Experiment 1, participants fixated a cross and needed to make large gaze shifts, but researchers provided explicit instructions about shifting. Children with autism were indistinguishable from comparison groups in this top-down task. In Experiment 2 (bottom-up), a fixation cross remained or was removed prior to the presentation of a peripheral target of low visual salience. In this gap-effect experiment, children with autism showed lengthened reaction times overall but no specific deficit in overlap trials. The results show evidence of a general deficit in manual responses to visual stimuli of low salience and no evidence of a deficit in top-down attention shifting. Older children with autism appeared able to generate appropriate motor responses, but stimulus-driven visual attention seemed impaired.

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