Topic
Autism research, explained
19 open-access autism studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- Do autism traits link to emotional skills and mental flexibility?
People with higher autistic traits tend to have lower emotional intelligence and struggle more when switching between emotional rules during cognitive tasks.
- Grammar issues in autism: Looking beyond standard tests
By analyzing conversational speech, researchers identified a subgroup of children with autism who have average intelligence and vocabulary but struggle significantly with grammar.
- Do social and non-social attention combine to predict autism?
Infants who show both reduced social attention and slower attention disengagement are at the highest risk for developing autism, with these factors combining additively rather than interactively.
- Social Mind-Reading Profiles in Autistic Children
Autistic children without intellectual disabilities fall into two distinct mind-reading groups, but even those with strong testing skills struggle to apply them in daily life.
- Can strong language skills offset autism's storytelling difficulties?
Autistic children with strong language skills matched typical peers on some sentence measures and on words for thoughts and feelings, but both autistic groups told stories with much weaker overall structure.
- Do people with more autistic traits see body movement differently?
Among ordinary students, those with more autistic traits were less automatically drawn to whole-body movement and leaned more on local joint motion, which let them match others' overall performance.
- Do looking patterns explain face recognition skills in autism?
Children who spend more time looking at faces rather than objects have better face-recognition skills, regardless of whether they have autism.
- Do autistic children struggle to mentally simulate places and events?
Autistic children had more trouble finding hidden targets in a virtual island and gave less accurate accounts of past and future events, but did as well as peers on a theory-of-mind task and on memory for item pairings.
- How do adults with autism socially sync up during improvisation?
Adults with autism can achieve highly synchronized movement with a partner during creative play, though their synchronization is briefer and less frequent when trying to follow another's lead.
- How do children with autism perceive action styles?
Children with autism struggle to recognize subtle and neutral action styles, requiring larger physical differences to distinguish between gentle and rude movements.
- Do autistic children look at a talker's mouth when they need to?
When listening to speech in noise, autistic children looked less at the talker's face and much less at the mouth than matched peers, instead lingering on uninformative parts of the face.
- Is Language Impairment in Autism Unique?
While individuals with autism and those with syntactic developmental language impairment score similarly on language tests, their specific error types and underlying cognitive deficits are fundamentally different.
- Do babies at risk for autism reach for a rolling ball less?
Six-month-old babies with an autistic older sibling watched a rolling ball just as closely as other babies but were more likely not to move their hands to catch it before it arrived.
- Can a Chinese mind-body exercise improve memory in autistic children?
Autistic children who practised the slow-movement exercise Nei Gong for a month recalled more pictures and used better memory strategies, while children doing muscle relaxation or no training did not improve.
- Does eye contact boost automatic imitation in autistic adults?
Autistic adults automatically imitated hand movements just like others, but unlike neurotypical adults their imitation was not boosted by eye contact.
- How do autistic children interpret 'some' when 'all' is true?
With only 'agree' or 'disagree' available, autistic children rejected misleading 'some' statements at least as often as other children, but with a middle option they chose the extremes while typically developing peers chose 'agree a bit'.
- Do autistic people see the 'average' of a group of objects?
Autistic adults, like neurotypical adults, automatically registered the average size of a group of circles even when they could not remember individual circles, challenging theories that autism blocks global processing.
- Where do autistic teens struggle with reading and writing?
Autistic teenagers read words and answered text questions as well as their peers, but they did worse when reading required switching strategies and when writing stories, and these weaknesses tracked their school grades.
- Which part of face recognition is harder for autistic adults?
Autistic adults were worse at perceiving faces accurately and at remembering them, but once perception was taken into account they were just as good as others at deciding whether two faces were the same person.