Superior Visual Search in 3 Year Old Children with Autism

Background: Perceptual disturbances in autism have long been documented and the visual search task has been used to provide empirical demonstrations of this anomaly. Studies have shown that superior visual search in autism is a developmentally stable feature of the disorder from children aged 7 years through to adulthood. Objectives: This study investigated visual search performance of young children with autism relative to typically developing matched controls to explore the stability of superior visual search in autism in early development. Methods: The performance of 3 year old children with autism on a modified visual search task was compared to that of a group of age matched and a group of developmentally matched typically developing control participants. A nonverbal shaping procedure was used to train participants to touch the screen location where they found a target item. On each trial a target item was presented among a varied number of distractor items. The stimuli were presented using a touch screen and the participants reaction times to touch the target item together with accuracy were recorded. Correct responses were rewarded with a short film clip. Results: The mean response time of the participants with autism to locate the target item at the largest display size was significantly faster than those of either of the control groups. Performance was comparable at small display sizes. Importantly accuracy rate of the autism group didn't differ from that of the control groups. Conclusions: Superior visual search in autism is developmentally stable from 3 years of age through to adulthood.