Previous studies measuring praxis abilities in young autistic children have only used praxis measures that were not optimised for autistic individuals. Hence, we used the FAB-R to measure praxis skills in autistic (n = 38) and typically developing (TD) children (n = 38) aged between four and 10 years. Praxis abilities were generally not different…

Social cognition impairment is a core shared phenotype in both schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) and autism spectrum disorders (ASD). This study compares social cognition performance through four different instruments in a sample of 147 individuals with ASD or SSD and in healthy controls. We found that both clinical groups perform similarly…

Reading monitoring is poorly explored, but it may have an impact on well-documented reading comprehension difficulties in autism. This study explores reading monitoring through the impact of instructions and different error types on reading behavior. Individuals with autism and matched controls read correct sentences and sentences containing…

While most typically developing (TD) participants have a coarse-to-fine processing style, people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) seem to be less globally and more locally biased when processing visual information. The stimulus-specific spatial frequency content might be directly relevant to determine this temporal hierarchy of visual…

Impairments in recognizing subtle facial expressions, in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), may relate to difficulties in constructing prototypes of these expressions. Eighteen children with predominantly intellectual low-functioning ASD (LFA, IQ <80) and two control groups (mental and chronological age matched), were assessed for…

Background: Problems with pragmatic aspects of language are well attested in individuals on the autism spectrum. It remains unclear, however, whether figurative language skills improve with language status and whether problems in figurative language are no longer present in highly verbal individuals with autism. Aims: To investigate whether highly…

Few published studies have systematically compared the efficacy of different prompt-fading methods in the training of complex response chains. The current study systematically compared a most-to-least physical prompt fading hierarchy with a most-to-least vocal prompt fading strategy in the training of four arbitrary Tinkertoy® construction tasks…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) engage in highly perseverative and inflexible behaviours. Technological tools, such as robots, received increased attention as social reinforces and/or assisting tools for improving the performance of children with ASD. The aim of our study is to investigate the role of the robotic toy Keepon in a…

The neurocognitive impairments associated with restricted and repetitive behaviors (RRBs) in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are not yet clear. Prior studies indicate that individuals with ASD show reduced cognitive flexibility, which could reflect difficulty shifting from a previously learned response pattern or a failure to maintain a new…

We aimed to disentangle contributions of socio-pragmatic and structural language deficits to narrative competence by comparing the narratives of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n=25), non-autistic children with language impairments (LI; n=23), and children with typical development (TD; n=27). Groups were matched for age (6½ to 15…

Impaired face perception in autism spectrum disorders is thought to reflect a perceptual style characterized by componential rather than configural processing of faces. This study investigated face processing in adolescents with autism spectrum disorders using the Thatcher illusion, a perceptual phenomenon exhibiting "inversion effects"…

This study explored pronoun production and general syntactic abilities in story retelling and story generation among children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Twenty-four children diagnosed with ASD, ages 6;1-14;3 and 17 typically-developing (TD) children ages 5;11-14;4 participated in the study. The linguistic measures for general syntax…

Language-impaired individuals with autism perform poorly on tests such as non-word repetition that are sensitive clinical markers of specific language impairment (SLI). This has fuelled the theory that language impairment in autism represents a co-morbid SLI. However, the underlying cause of these deficits may be different in each disorder. In a…

As a large heterogeneity is observed across studies on interference control in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), research may benefit from the use of a cognitive framework that models specific processes underlying reactive and proactive control of interference. Reactive control refers to the expression and suppression of responses and proactive…

Prosaccade and antisaccade errors in the context of social and nonsocial stimuli were investigated in youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 19) a matched control sample (n = 19), and a small sample of youth with obsessive compulsive disorder (n = 9). Groups did not differ in error rates in the prosaccade condition for any stimulus…