Enhanced discrimination in autism

This study investigated reasons for the superiority of children with autism compared to typically developing children at visual search. It is generally accepted that target-distractor discriminability is the critical determinant of search rate (i.e. when the target and distractors are highly similar performance is slow and the converse is also true) which raises the possibility that the superior visual search in autism is due to an enhanced ability to discriminate between display items. To test this hypothesis the performance of children with and without autism was compared on a series of visual search tasks in which target distractor similarity was systematically manipulated. In fine with the predictions the results demonstrated that children with autism have an enhanced ability to discriminate between display items. The possible repercussions of an enhanced visual discrimination ability and thus it´s role in the autistic disorder will be discussed together with possible underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms of this phenomenon.