Repetitive and restricted behaviours are a core feature of autism, and cognition in autistic individuals may also be repetitive and restricted. We aimed to investigate the relationship between repetitive behaviours and repetitive thinking. We predicted that autistic people would experience more repetitive, perseverative, visual and negative…

Atypical learning and memory in early life can promote atypical behaviors in later life. Less relational learning and inflexible retrieval in childhood may enhance restricted and repeated behaviors in patients with autism spectrum disorder. The purpose of this study was to elucidate the mechanisms of atypical memory in children with autism…

To identify quantitative indicators of social communication dysfunctions, we explored the oculomotor performances in subjects with autism spectrum disorders. Discordant findings in the literature have been reported for oculomotor behavior in subjects with autism spectrum disorders. This study aimed to explore reflexive and voluntary saccadic…

Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) is widely used to estimate autistic intelligence (Joseph in The neuropsychology of autism. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011; Goldstein et al. in "Assessment of autism spectrum disorders." Guilford Press, New York, 2008; Mottron in "J Autism Dev Disord" 34(1):19-27, 2004).…

Understanding that people's ideas may be false is a challenging step in Theory of Mind (ToM) development, which is accomplished around the age of 4-5 years old by typically developing (TD) children. False-belief attribution remains difficult beyond this age for certain clinical populations, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), where delays in…

While there is a general consensus in the literature that individuals with autism spectrum disorder have difficulty with cognitive empathy, much less is known about emotional empathy processing in these individuals. Most research has employed subjective self-report measures, which can often be misinterpreted or under-reported/over-reported. More…

Since its initial development, the embedded figures test (EFT) has been used extensively to measure local-global perceptual style. However, little is known about the perceptual factors that influence target detection. The current study aimed to investigate "disembedding" in children with and without ASD, aged 8-15 years, using the newly…

Previous research suggested that adolescents with autism spectrum disorder are better than typically developing children in detecting local, non-social details within complex visual scenes. To better understand these differences, we used the image database by Sareen et al., containing the size and on-screen location information of all changes in…

Social-emotional impairments are considered core symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Although numerous interventions have been developed to remediate the social deficits in children with ASD, few have been designed to meet the needs of youth. Given research demonstrating relations between emotional intelligence (EI) and social outcomes in…

The comprehension of dynamically unfolding social situations is made possible by the seamless integration of multimodal information merged with rich intuitions about the thoughts and behaviors of others. We examined how high-functioning adults with autism spectrum disorder and neurotypical controls made a complex social judgment (i.e. rating the…

Proficient use of spatial terms such as "under," "to the left of" or "in front of" is a central component of daily communication and is important in the development of language and spatial cognition. Here we examine spatial language abilities in intellectually high-functioning individuals with autism spectrum…

Background: Academic challenges such as losing/not turning in assignments, misplacing materials, and inefficient studying are common in middle-school students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) without intellectual disability. Deficits in organization, planning, prioritizing, memory/materials management, and studying skills [i.e. academic…

Objectives: The study aimed to examine the ability of children with an Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) to depict social (pride and shame) vs. basic (happiness and sadness) emotions in their human figure drawings. Methods: Eleven children with a formal diagnosis of an ASC matched on gender and verbal mental age with 11 children with typical…

Autism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is associated with problems in empathy. Recent research suggests that impaired control over self-other overlap based on motor representations in individuals with autism spectrum disorder might underlie these difficulties. In order to investigate the relationship of self-other…

Autistic children have problems in cognitive and motor skills areas. This study investigated the effects of motor and cognitive problems on daily living activities and quality of life in autistic children. Thirty-two autistic children were included in the study. Thirty typically developing children were selected as the control group. The Bruininks…