TY  - JOUR
TI  - Susceptibility to Ebbinghaus and Müller-Lyer illusions in autistic children: a comparison of three different methods
AV  - public
Y1  - 2017/03/23/
VL  - 8
IS  - 16
N1  - This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
N2  - Background: Studies reporting altered susceptibility to visual illusions in autistic individuals compared to that typically developing individuals have been taken to reflect differences in perception (e.g. reduced global processing), but could instead reflect differences in higher-level decision-making strategies.

Methods: We measured susceptibility to two contextual illusions (Ebbinghaus, Müller-Lyer) in autistic children aged 6?14 years and typically developing children matched in age and non-verbal ability using three methods. In experiment 1, we used a new two-alternative-forced-choice method with a roving pedestal designed to minimise cognitive biases. Here, children judged which of two comparison stimuli was most similar in size to a reference stimulus. In experiments 2 and 3, we used methods previously used with autistic populations. In experiment 2, children judged whether stimuli were the ?same? or ?different?, and in experiment 3, we used a method-of-adjustment task.

Results: Across all tasks, autistic children were equally susceptible to the Ebbinghaus illusion as typically developing children. Autistic children showed a heightened susceptibility to the Müller-Lyer illusion, but only in the method-of-adjustment task. This result may reflect differences in decisional criteria.

Conclusions: Our results are inconsistent with theories proposing reduced contextual integration in autism and suggest that previous reports of altered susceptibility to illusions may arise from differences in decision-making, rather than differences in perception per se. Our findings help to elucidate the underlying reasons for atypical responses to perceptual illusions in autism and call for the use of methods that reduce cognitive bias when measuring illusion susceptibility.
ID  - discovery1551537
UR  - http://doi.org/10.1186/s13229-017-0127-y
SN  - 2040-2392
JF  - Molecular Autism
A1  - Manning, C
A1  - Morgan, MJ
A1  - Allen, CTW
A1  - Pellicano, E
KW  - Autism
KW  -  Vision
KW  -  Visual illusions
KW  -  Perception
KW  -  Cognitive bias
KW  -  Response bias
KW  -  Global processing Context
ER  -