No association between autistic traits and contextual influences on eye-movements during reading.

ABSTRACT: Individuals with autism spectrum disorders are claimed to show a local cognitive bias, termed "weak central coherence", which manifests in a reduced influence of contextual information on linguistic processing. Here, we investigated whether this bias might also be demonstrated by individuals who exhibit sub-clinical levels of autistic traits, as has been found for other aspects of autistic cognition. The eye-movements of 71 university students were monitored as they completed a reading comprehension task. Consistent with previous studies, participants made shorter fixations on words that were highly predicted on the basis of preceding sentence context. However, contrary to the weak central coherence account, this effect was not reduced amongst individuals with high levels of autistic trait

SUBMITTER: Caruana N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4081132 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature