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. 2022 Apr 18;12(4):113.
doi: 10.3390/bs12040113.

How the External Visual Noise Affects Motion Direction Discrimination in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Nadejda Bocheva  1 , Ivan Hristov  1 , Simeon Stefanov  1 , Tsvetalin Totev  1 , Svetla Nikolaeva Staykova  2 , Milena Slavcheva Mihaylova  1
Affiliations

How the External Visual Noise Affects Motion Direction Discrimination in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Nadejda Bocheva et al. Behav Sci (Basel). .

Abstract

Along with social, cognitive, and behavior deficiencies, peculiarities in sensory processing, including an atypical global motion processing, have been reported in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The question about the enhanced motion pooling in ASD is still debatable. The aim of the present study was to compare global motion integration in ASD using a low-density display and the equivalent noise (EN) approach. Fifty-seven children and adolescents with ASD or with typical development (TD) had to determine the average direction of movement of 30 Laplacian-of-Gaussian micro-patterns. They moved in directions determined by a normal distribution with a standard deviation of 2°, 5°, 10°, 15°, 25°, and 35°, corresponding to the added external noise. The data obtained showed that the ASD group has much larger individual differences in motion direction thresholds on external noise effect than the TD group. Applying the equivalent noise paradigm, we found that the global motion direction discrimination thresholds were more elevated in ASD than in controls at all noise levels. These results suggest that ASD individuals have a poor ability to integrate the local motion information in low-density displays.

Keywords: Autism Spectrum Disorder; equivalent noise paradigm; motion direction; visual perception.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Schematic stimulus representation. Mean dot movement to the right (a,c) and to the left (b,d) of the vertical. The added external noise is 5° (a,b) or 15° (c,d).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Example of the micro-patterns used in the experiments.
Figure 3
Figure 3
The dependence of global motion direction discrimination threshold on the noise level for the two groups of observers: (a) ASD group; (b) TD group. The lines represent the dependence of thresholds on the noise level for each participant.
Figure 4
Figure 4
The mean discrimination thresholds for the two groups and their 95% confidence intervals. The solid lines show the functions fitted to the data by Equation (1). The data for the ASD are in red, and for the TD group in blue.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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