Objectives: (i) To explore the profile of basic visual motion processing abilities in ASD (ii) To explore the association with the Frith-Happé animations, a higher-level task that demands the interpretation of moving, interacting agents in order to understand mental states.
Methods: 89 adolescents with an ASD (mean age = 15 years 6 months (SD = 6 months); mean full-scale IQ = 85.5 (SD = 17.6)) and 52 adolescents without an ASD (mean age =15;6 (6 months); mean full-scale IQ = 88.4 (22.6)) were tested. We investigated performance on three measures of basic visual processing: motion coherence, form-from-motion and biological motion, as well as the Frith-Happé animations.
Results: At the group level, we found no evidence of differences between the two groups on the basic visual motion processing tasks. However, we identified a tail of individuals with ASD (18% of the sample) who had exceptionally poor biological motion processing abilities compared to the non-ASD group, and who were characterised by low IQ. Consistent with previous work, performance on the Frith-Happé animations was impaired in the ASD group. For both groups of participants, performance on the biological motion task uniquely correlated with performance on the Frith-Happé animations.
Conclusions: The data do not suggest a fundamental impairment in basic visual motion processing in adolescents with ASD. Understanding the mental states of motion-defined characters (Frith-Happé animations) uniquely associates with the ability to perceive biological motion. We hypothesise that this association reflects the shared motion-based social-cognitive characteristics of the two tasks, which have a common neural underpinning in the superior temporal sulcus.
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