The study by the UCL Institute of Education (IOE) involved 33 children with autism and 33 children without autism and asked them to judge the average direction of a set of dots moving on a computer screen (pictured below).
In the test, the children were told the dots were fish and they had to choose whether they were swimming towards a green or red reef.
Children with autism did better at working out the overall direction of the dots when they moved in different directions.
Researcher Dr Catherine Manning from the University of Oxford, who was part of the research team, said, ‘The ability to combine motion information helps us make sense of what we see, for example, by allowing us to see the overall movement of a shoal of fish. However, it is also important to know what information needs to be filtered out. An increased combination of motion information may in some way “overload” a child with autism in a dynamic world.’
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