Dr Elizabeth Milne's Publications\ Journal Articles Journal Articles MILNE, E., SCOPE, A., PASCALIS, O., BUCKLEY, D., & Makeig, S. (2009). Independent Component Analysis Reveals Atypical Electroencephalographic Activity During Visual Perception in Individuals with Autism. Biological Psychiatry, 65, 22-30. Background: Individuals with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) experience atypical visual perception, yet the etiology of this remains unknown. The aim of this study was to investigate the neural correlates of visual perception in individuals with and without ASD by carrying out a detailed analysis of the dynamic brain processes elicited by perception of a simple visual stimulus. Methods: We investigated perception in 20 individuals with ASD and 20 control subjects with electroencephalography (EEG). Visual evoked potentials elicited by Gabor patches of varying spatial frequency and stimulus-induced changes in α- and γ-frequency bands of independent components were compared in those with and without ASD. Results: By decomposing the EEG data into independent components, we identified several processes that contributed to the average event related potential recorded at the scalp. Differences between the ASD and control groups were found only in some of these processes. Specifically, in those components that were in or near the striate or extrastriate cortex, stimulus spatial frequency exerted a smaller effect on induced increases in α- and γ-band power, and time to peak α-band power was reduced, in the participants with ASD. Induced α-band power of components that were in or near the cingulate gyrus was increased in the participants with ASD, and the components that were in or near the parietal cortex did not differ between the two groups. Conclusions: Atypical processing is evident in individuals with ASD during perception of simple visual stimuli. The implications of these data for existing theories of atypical perception in ASD are discussed. Further details MILNE, E., & SCOPE, A. (2008). Are children with autistic spectrum disorders susceptible to contour illusions? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 26, 91-102. Children with autism have been shown to be less susceptible to Kanisza type contour illusions than children without autism (Happé, 1996). Other authors have suggested that this finding could be explained by the fact that participants with autism were required to make a potentially ambiguous verbal response which may have masked whether or not they actually perceived the illusory contours (Ropar & Mitchell, 1999). The present study tested perception of illusory contours in children with autism using a paradigm that requires participants to make a forced choice about the dimensions of a shape defined by illusory contours. It was reasoned that accuracy of the participant on this task would indicate whether or not children with autism could perceive illusory contours. A total of 18 children with autistic spectrum disorder, 16 children with special educational needs not including autism and 20 typically developing children completed an experimental task which assessed perception of Kanisza-style rectangles defined by illusory contours. There were no significant differences between the performance of the children with autism and either of the two control groups, suggesting that perception of illusory contours is intact in autism. Further details Smith, H., & MILNE, E. (2008). Reduced change blindness suggests enhanced attention to detail in individuals with autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Background: The phenomenon of change blindness illustrates that a limited number of items within the visual scene are attended to at any one time. It has been suggested that individuals with autism focus attention on less contextually relevant aspects of the visual scene, show superior perceptual discrimination and notice details which are often ignored by typical observers. Methods: In this study we investigated change blindness in autism by asking participants to detect continuity errors deliberately introduced into a short film. Whether the continuity errors involved central/marginal or social/non-social aspects of the visual scene was varied. Thirty adolescent participants, 15 with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) and 15 typically developing (TD) controls participated. Results: The participants with ASD detected significantly more errors than the TD participants. Both groups identified more errors involving central rather than marginal aspects of the scene, although this effect was larger in the TD participants. There was no difference in the number of social or non-social errors detected by either group of participants. Conclusion: In line with previous data suggesting an abnormally broad attentional spotlight and enhanced perceptual function in individuals with ASD, the results of this study suggest enhanced awareness of the visual scene in ASD. The results of this study could reflect superior top-down control of visual search in autism, enhanced perceptual function, or inefficient filtering of visual information in ASD. Further details Drew, A., Baird, G., Taylor, E., MILNE, E., & Charman, T. (2007). Developmental change in non-verbal communication in toddlers with autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 37, 648-666. The Social Communication Assessment for Toddlers with Autism (SCATA) was designed to measure non-verbal communication, including early and atypical communication, in young children with autism spectrum disorder. Each communicative act is scored according to its form, function, role and complexity. The SCATA was used to measure communicative ability longitudinally in two samples of toddlers with autism spectrum disorder. Overall frequency of non-verbal communicative acts did not change between the two assessments. However, the form and complexity, the function and the role the child took in the interaction did change with time. Both frequency and function of communicative acts in toddlerhood were positively associated with later language ability: social acts, comments and initiations showed greater predictive association than requests and responses. Further details MILNE, E., & Griffiths, H. J. (2007). Visual Perception and Visual Dysfunction in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Literature Review. British and Irish Orthoptics Journal, 4, 15-20. Aim: To describe autistic spectrum disorder (ASD), and to review the evidence for associated visual dysfunction in the disorder. Method: An initial literature search was performed using Web of Science with the key words: autism and sensory; autism and vision; autism and visual; and autism and oculomotor. Papers which reported investigation of basic vision in autism were obtained, and any additional references listed in these articles that referred to other relevant data but did not emerge from the original search were followed up. Results: There is evidence that basic visual function may be affected in individuals with ASD. However, the mixed nature and limited number of empirical studies conducted make it difficult to draw clear conclusions as to specific deficits and areas of spared visual function in ASD. Conclusion: It is likely that patients with ASD may present to the orthoptic department. Specific vision screening of this population may be indicated, and further study based on large well-defined samples would be of significant value. Key words: Autistic spectrum disorder, Visual dysfunction, Visual perception MILNE, E., White, S., Campbell, R., Swettenham, J., Hansen, P., & Ramus, F. (2006). Motion and form coherence in autistic spectrum disorder: Relationship to motor control and 2:4 digit ratio. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 36, 225-237. Children with autistic spectrum disorder and controls performed tasks of coherent motion and form detection, and motor control. Additionally, the ratio of the 2nd and 4th digits of these children, which is thought to be an indicator of foetal testosterone, was measured. Children in the experimental group were impaired at tasks of motor control, and had lower 2D:4D than controls. There were no group differences in motion or form detection. However a sub-group of children with autism were selectively impaired at motion detection. There were significant relationships between motion coherence detection and motor control in both groups of children, and also between motion detection, fine motor control and 2D:4D in the group of children with autistic spectrum disorder. KEY WORDS: Motion detection; motor control; foetal testosterone; autistic spectrum disorder. Further details White, S., Frith, U., MILNE, E., Rosen, S., Swettenham, J., & Ramus, F. (2006). A double dissociation between sensorimotor impairments and reading disability: A comparison of autistic and dyslexic children. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 23, 748-761. Further details White, S., MILNE, E., Rosen, S., Hansen, P., Swettenham, J., Frith, U., et al. (2006). The role of sensorimotor processing in dyslexia: a multiple case study of dyslexic children. Developmental Science, 9, 237-269. This study attempts to investigate the role of sensorimotor impairments in the reading disability that characterizes dyslexia. Twenty-three children with dyslexia were compared to 22 control children, matched for age and non-verbal intelligence, on tasks assessing literacy as well as phonological, visual, auditory and motor abilities. The dyslexic group as a whole were significantly impaired on phonological, but not sensorimotor, tasks. Analysis of individual data suggests that the most common impairments were on phonological and visual stress tasks and the vast majority of dyslexics had one of these two impairments. Furthermore, phonological skill was able to account for variation in literacy skill, to the exclusion of all sensorimotor factors, while neither auditory nor motor skill predicted any variance in phonological skill. Visual stress seems to account for a small proportion of dyslexics, independently of the commonly reported phonological deficit. However, there is little evidence for a causal role of auditory, motor or other visual impairments. Further details MILNE, E., Swettenham, J., & Campbell, R. (2005). Motion perception and autistic spectrum disorder: A review. Current Psychology of Cognition, 23, pp 4-34. Recent evidence has indicated that some children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) show reduced ability to detect visual motion. The data suggest that this impairment is present in children with a range of autistic spectrum diagnoses, but not present in all children diagnosed with ASD. The occurrence of abnormal motion perception in children with ASD has led to speculation regarding the root of this impairment. Hypotheses regarding reduced sensitivity of the visual magnocellular system / cortical dorsal stream (Milne et al., 2002; Spencer et al., 2000) and reduced neuronal integration (Bertone et al., 2003), will be discussed in this review. Clinical implications of the impairment, such as the degree to which motion perception may be related to diagnostic criteria and /or symptom severity in ASD, and the relationship between abnormal motion perception in autistic spectrum, and other, non-autistic spectrum developmental disorders will also be discussed. The conclusion is drawn that more research should be carried out including larger samples of participants, and that in future studies researchers should provide details of the variability of performance in their data, and investigate relationships between motion perception, diagnostic criteria, symptom severity and other potential correlates which, it is hoped will lead to further understanding of the implications of abnormal motion perception in ASD. Further details Mohammed, T., Campbell, R., MacSweeney, M., MILNE, E., & Coleman, M. (2005). Speechreading skill and visual movement sensitivity are related in deaf speechreaders. Perception, 34, 205 - 216. Individual speechreading abilities have been linked with a range of cognitive and language-processing factors. The role of specifically visual abilities in relation to the processing of visible speech is less studied. Here we report that the detection of coherent visible motion in random-dot kinematogram displays is related to speechreading skill in deaf, but not in hearing, speechreaders. A control task requiring the detection of visual form showed no such relationship. Additionally, people born deaf were better speechreaders than hearing people on a new test of silent speechreading. Further details Sweetenham, J., Condie, S., Campbell, R., MILNE, E., & Coleman, M. (2003). Does the perception of moving eyes trigger reflexive visual orienting in autism? "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Series B", 358, 325 - 334. Does movement of the eyes in one or another direction function as an automatic attentional cue to a location of interest? Two experiments explored the directional movement of the eyes in a full face for speed of detection of an aftercoming location target in young people with autism and in control participants. Our aim was to investigate whether a low-level perceptual impairment underlies the delay in gaze following characteristic of autism. The participants' task was to detect a target appearing on the left or right of the screen either 100 ms or 800 ms after a face cue appeared with eyes averting to the left or right. Despite instructions to ignore eye-movement in the face cue, people with autism and control adolescents were quicker to detect targets that had been preceded by an eye movement cue congruent with target location compared with targets preceded by an incongruent eye movement cue. The attention shifts are thought to be reflexive because the cue was to be ignored, and because the effect was found even when cue-target duration was short (100 ms). Because (experiment two) the effect persisted even when the face was inverted, it would seem that the direction of movement of eyes can provide a powerful (involuntary) cue to a location. Further details MILNE, E., Swettenham, J., Hansen, P., Campbell, R., Jeffries, H., & Plaisted, K. (2002). High Motion Coherence Thresholds in Children with Autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 43, 255 - 264. Background: We assessed motion processing in a group of high functioning children with autism and a group of typically developing children, using a coherent motion detection task. Method: Twenty-five children with autism (mean age 11 years, 8 months) and 22 typically developing children matched for non-verbal mental ability and chronological age were required to detect the direction of moving dots in a random dot kinematogram. Results: The group of children with autism showed significantly higher motion coherence thresholds than the typically developing children (i.e., they showed an impaired ability to detect coherent motion). Conclusions: This finding suggests that some individuals with autism may show impairments in low-level visual processing specifically in the magnocellular visual pathway. The findings are discussed in terms of implications for higher-level cognitive theories of autism, and the suggestion is made that more work needs to be carried out to further investigate lowlevel visual processing in autism. Keywords: Autistic disorder, motion perception, central coherence, magnocellular pathway, visual processing. Further details MILNE, E., & Grafman, J. (2001). Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Lesions in Humans Eliminate Implicit Gender Stereotyping. Journal of Neuroscience, 21, RC150(151-156). Patients with prefrontal cortex lesions and controls were administered an implicit association task (IAT) that measured the degree of association between male and female names and their stereotypical attributes of strength and weakness. They also completed three questionnaires measuring their explicit judgment regarding gender-related stereotypical attributes. There were no between-group differences on the explicit measures. On the IAT, patients with dorsolateral lesions and controls showed a strong association, whereas patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions had a significantly lower association, between the stereotypical attributes of men and women and their concepts of gender. This finding provides support for the hypothesis that patients with ventromedial prefrontal lesions have a deficit in automatically accessing certain aspects of overlearned associated social knowledge. Further details Last update: 10 Nov 2011

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