Grant: Operating Grant

Persons with autism interact with their visual world differently. Studies assessing visual abilities in autism have demonstrated that persons with autism perceive socially-related information, such as faces, differently. In addition, studies have also shown that more simple visual information that does not contain social information (or non-social), such as colour and motion, is also perceived differently. The goal of the studies is to investigate when and how non-social and social perception differs form that of typically-developing children from the ages of 4 through 15 years, and how it related to social behaviour in autism. Specifically, we wish to assess whether atypical social perception (face perception) results from a non-social origin - the deviant development of visual brain areas responsible for processing simple sensory information. Expected results may have major heuristic and clinical consequences including, (i) incorporating knowledge regarding perceptual strengths and challenges into existing cognitive and behavioral interventions in an age specific manner, (ii) possibly leading to alternative remediation regarding social behavior in autism.