Research has shown that large visual illusions and an external focus of attention can improve novice's motor learning. However, the combined effects of these approaches and the underlying mechanisms have yet to be studied. Therefore, the present study examined the effects of a large visual illusion and an external focus on the learning of a dart…

Research consistently shows that autistic adults do not attend to faces as much as non-autistic adults. However, this conclusion is largely based on studies using pre-recorded videos or photographs as stimuli. In studies using real social scenarios, the evidence is not as clear. To explore the extent to which differences in findings relate to…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been found to view social scenes differently compared to typically developing (TD) peers, but results can vary depending on context and age. We used eye-tracking in children and adults (age 6-63) to assess allocation of visual attention in a dynamic social orientation paradigm previously used…

This study investigates how children aged two to eight years (N = 129) and adults (N = 29) use auditory and visual speech for word recognition. The goal was to bridge the gap between apparent successes of visual speech processing in young children in visual-looking tasks, with apparent difficulties of speech processing in older children from…

Participants with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (n = 121, mean [SD] age: 14.6 [8.0] years) and typically developing (TD) controls (n = 40, 16.4 [13.3] years) were presented with a series of videos representing biological motion on one side of a computer monitor screen and non-biological motion on the other, while their eye movements were…

Studies have identified deficits in attention in individuals with aphasia in language and nonlanguage tasks. Attention may play a role in the construction and use of language, as well as in learning and the process of rehabilitation, yet the role of attention on rehabilitation is not fully understood. To improve the understanding of attention and…

In direct interactions with others, 9-month-old infants' learning about objects is facilitated when the interaction partner addresses the infant through eye contact before looking toward an object. In this study we investigated whether similar factors promote infants' observational learning from third-party interactions. In Experiment 1,…

Atypical attention is considered to have an important role in the development of autism. Yet, it remains unclear whether these attentional difficulties are specific to the social domain. This study aimed to examine attentional orienting in autistic and non-autistic adults from and to non-social and social stimuli. We utilised a modified…

Adults use both bottom-up sensory inputs and top-down signals to generate predictions about future sensory inputs. Infants have also been shown to make predictions with simple stimuli and recent work has suggested top-down processing is available early in infancy. However, it is unknown whether this indicates that top-down prediction is an ability…

Implicit up/down words, such as "bird" and "foot", systematically influence performance on visual tasks involving immediately following targets in compatible versus incompatible locations. Recent studies have observed that the semantic relation between prime words and target pictures can strongly influence the size and even the…

While altered gaze behaviour during facial emotion recognition has been observed in autistic individuals, there remains marked inconsistency in findings, with the majority of previous research focused towards the processing of basic emotional expressions. There is a need to examine whether atypical gaze during facial emotion recognition extends to…

Visual attention in complex, dynamic scenes is attracted to locations that contain socially relevant features, such as faces, and to areas that are visually salient. Previous work suggests that there is a "global shift" over development such that observers increasingly attend to faces with age. However, no prior work has tested whether…

The present study investigated how the eye contact perception of ingroup and outgroup faces by Japanese adults with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder differed from that of age-, sex-, and IQ-matched typically developing individuals. The autism spectrum disorder and typically developing individuals were equally likely to perceive subtly…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders typically exhibit reduced visual attention towards social stimuli relative to neurotypical individuals. Importantly, however, attention is not a static process, and it remains unclear how such effects may manifest over time. Exploring these momentary changes in gaze behaviour can more clearly illustrate…

Being able to follow the direction of another person's line-of-sight facilitates social communication. To date, much research on the processes involved in social communication has been conducted using computer-based tasks that lack ecological validity. The current paradigm assesses how accurately participants can follow a social partner's…