Visual motion perception in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

In everyday experience, visual motion is an extremely important source of information about the world. Motion cues are vital to our perception of where objects are and where they are moving. Biological motion cues give us the information from which to build the fine-grained, almost subconscious understanding of another's emotions and intentions that is so often necessary in social interactions. Recent research has suggested that those with autism may not perceive the world in the same way that typically developing people do. Several reports of impairments in visual motion processing raise the possibility that people with autism don't have access to the same wealth of information about movement in the visual world. With even subtle impairments in motion perception, they may miss information about object placement and movement. They may have greater difficulty understanding the self-motion cues that help in spatial navigation and motor planning. They may have a severely degraded understanding of the intention and emotion of others because they do not perceive all the subtle motion cues during social interaction on which we unconsciously rely. In the experiments reported here, we investigated visual motion processing in those with autism, focusing specifically on possible impairments in coherent motion and biological motion processing. Our psychophysical results suggest that there is a deficit in dynamic visual processing in those with autism, one that is seen more strongly and consistently when looking at biological motion perception than coherent motion perception. The results from the neuroimaging experiment reported here suggest that this impairment does not originate in early motion sensitive visual areas of the brain but in high-level attentional networks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)