Children with autism excel at motion detection test

Children with autism were better able to tell whether fish (white dots with arrows) were swimming toward the red or green reef, a game that tested the ability to integrate different trajectories.

C. Manning

By Laura Sanders

May 5, 2015 at 5:00 pm

On a test of visual perception, children with autism perceive moving dots with more clarity than children without the disorder. The results, published in the May 6 Journal of Neuroscience, reveal a way in which children with autism see the world differently.

When asked to determine the overall direction of a mess of dots moving in slightly different directions, children with autism outperformed children without the disorder. Other tests of motion detection didn’t turn up any differences. The results suggest that children with autism may be taking in and combining more motion information than children without autism, says study coauthor Catherine Manning of the University of Oxford. This heightened ability may contribute to feelings of sensory overload, the researchers suggest.