Abstract

Although the social manifestations of autism are widely known there is an increasing interest in perceptual properties that might be associated with this condition. In the first part of my talk I will discuss recent research in our lab using psychophysics and fMRI, which explored the visual perception of human movement in adults on the autism spectrum (McKay et al, 2012). This study showed that although adults on the autism spectrum performed equal to an age and IQ matched group of typical adults there were striking differences revealed by fMRI on the networks recruited by the visual task. These results provide unique evidence of compensatory processes in adults with autism. In the second part of my talk I will introduce ongoing work that examines audiovisual perception in adults with autism. Here we are exploring whether differences exist between groups in how tightly audio and visual signals need to be aligned in time to be perceived as a unitary event.

McKay, L.S., Simmons, D.R., McAleer, P., Marjoram, D., Piggot, J. & Pollick, F.E. (2012). Do distinct atypical cortical networks process biological motion information in adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders? Neuroimage, 59(2), 1524-1533.