Coherent versus Component Motion Perception in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Research on visual perception in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) tries to reveal the underlying mechanisms of aberrant local and global processing. Global motion perception is one way to study this aspect of ASD. We used plaid motion stimuli, which can be perceived as a coherently moving pattern, requiring feature integration, or as two transparent gratings sliding over each other. If global motion detection is impaired in ASD, this would lead to a decrease of the total time that a coherent pattern is perceived. However, in contrast to other studies in the literature, our results gave no evidence of impaired global motion perception in people with ASD. A reconciliation of the different outcomes is proposed based on spatial frequency processing in ASD.