Authors: Grace Iarocci Jacob A Burack David I Shore Laurent Mottron James T Enns
Publish Date: 2006/01/06
Volume: 36, Issue: 1, Pages: 117-129
Abstract
Global–local processing was examined in highfunctioning children with autism and in groups of typically developing children In experiment 1 the effects of structural bias were tested by comparing visual search that favored access to either local or global targets The children with autism were not unusually sensitive to either level of visual structure In experiment 2 a structural global bias was pitted against an implicit task bias favoring the local level Children with autism were least sensitive to the structural global bias but showed greater sensitivity to the implicit task bias This suggests that autism is associated with differences in the executive control processes used to guide attention to either the global or local level and strategies may be more “data driven”We thank the students parents teachers and school principals who participated in this study Dr Peter Doehring Director of the Delaware Autistic Program and Hanna Kovshoff Tara Flanagan and Catherine Zygmuntowicz for their invaluable help with data collection Grace Iarocci’s work was supported by a research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Jake Burack’s work was also supported by a research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada David Shore thanks the Killam Trust funds Dalhousie and the Rotman Research Institute for postdoctoral fellowships James Enns’ work was supported by an NSERC Canada Discovery Grant
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