ReviewJournal of autism and developmental disorders2016
The Mechanisms Underlying the ASD Advantage in Visual Search.
Review in Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 66 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
66 citing papers in PubMed, 122 citations in OpenAlex.
- Atypical Attentional Effort During Visual Search in Autistic Adults: Evidence From Task-Evoked Pupillary Responses.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2026Article
- Attention and learning strategies reveal distinct dimensions of psychiatric diseases.Research square · 2026Article
- Visual Search Performance in Children With ASD: A Combined Case-Control and Longitudinal Study.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2026Article
- The role of stimulus characteristics in visual attention: an eye-tracking study.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Mapping sensory sensitivity in autism.Molecular autism · 2026Article
- Remote Sensory-Cognitive Assessment in Children with Autism: Evaluating Feasibility and Performance Outcomes.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Autistic Trait Level and Reaction Time in Older Adults: The Influence of Sex and Task upon Study Outcome.Autism in adulthood · 2026Article
- The Impact of Perceptual Load and Distractors' Perceptual Grouping on Visual Search in ASD.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Visual orientation discrimination in adults with ADHD and ASD: the differential impact of clinical diagnosis and trait severity.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Perceptual discrimination learning in children with and without autism: The effect of feedback, modality, and progressive-learning.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Excitatory/inhibitory ratio disruption modulates neural synchrony and flow directions in a cortical microcircuit.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Using the cognitive rigidity-flexibility dimension to deepen our understanding of the autism spectrum.Personality neuroscience · 2025Review
- High neural noise in autism: A hypothesis currently at the nexus of explanatory power.Heliyon · 2024Review
- Progress towards understanding risk factor mechanisms in the development of autism spectrum disorders.Biochemical Society transactions · 2024Review
- Visual processing and decision-making in autism and dyslexia: Insights from cross-syndrome approaches.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2024Review
- Characterizing Attention Resource Capacity in Autism: A Multiple Object Tracking Study.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2024Article
- Eye Tracking Post Processing to Detect Visual Artifacts and Quantify Visual Attention under Cognitive Task Activity during fMRI.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Maternal Thyroid Dysfunction During Pregnancy as an Etiologic Factor in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Challenges and Opportunities for Research.Thyroid : official journal of the American Thyroid Association · 2024Review
- Elevated and accelerated: Locus coeruleus activity and visual search abilities in autistic children.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2023Article
- Autism-Related Differences in Cortical Activation When Observing, Producing, and Imitating Communicative Gestures: An fNIRS Study.Brain sciences · 2023Article
6 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
A number of studies have demonstrated that individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are faster or more successful than typically developing control participants at various visual-attentional tasks (for reviews, see Dakin and Frith in Neuron 48:497-507, 2005; Simmons et al. in Vis Res 49:2705-2739, 2009). This "ASD advantage" was first identified in the domain of visual search by Plaisted et al. (J Child Psychol Psychiatry 39:777-783, 1998). Here we survey the findings of visual search studies from the past 15 years that contrasted the performance of individuals with and without ASD. Although there are some minor caveats, the overall consensus is that-across development and a broad range of symptom severity-individuals with ASD reliably outperform controls on visual search. The etiology of the ASD advantage has not been formally specified, but has been commonly attributed to 'enhanced perceptual discrimination', a superior ability to visually discriminate between targets and distractors in such tasks (e.g. O'Riordan in Cognition 77:81-96, 2000). As well, there is considerable evidence for impairments of the attentional network in ASD (for a review, see Keehn et al. in J Child Psychol Psychiatry 37:164-183, 2013). We discuss some recent results from our laboratory that support an attentional, rather than perceptual explanation for the ASD advantage in visual search. We speculate that this new conceptualization may offer a better understanding of some of the behavioral symptoms associated with ASD, such as over-focusing and restricted interests.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.