Gaining knowledge of the temporal dynamics of ensemble

Gaining knowledge of the temporal dynamics of ensemble perception would be a valuable way to address this issue. For example, our results suggest that ensemble perception could be less rapid as a process in autistic children, due to its greater reliance on some kind of perceptual reasoning. Our study, and the original study of Haberman and Whitney (2007), obtained responses after the stimuli have remained on screen for 2s, and therefore could not provide reliable measures of reaction times. Studies with time-contingent designs, more demanding stimuli, as well as electrophysiological approaches could be used to assess the rapidity of ensemble perception in typical development and autism. Theories of autistic perception and ensemble perception also need to consider the possibility of efficient compensation for ensemble perception in autism. Developmental and other studies on ensemble perception have argued that its early emergence and ubiquity reflect its fundamental importance in perception and, in the case of social stimuli, in the development of social behaviour and cognition (Haberman and Whitney, 2012; Sweeny et al., 2014; Neumann et al., 2013; Rhodes et al., 2015; Whitney et al., 2013). A number of previous studies have also established that autistic individuals present atypical PR619 to various dimensions of facial stimuli (e.g. Pellicano et al., 2007; Pellicano et al., 2013), suggestive of limitations in their abilities to extract norms for faces seen during the recent history of sensory input. Such limitations might give rise to difficulties in ensemble perception, with profound effects in their ability to adapt and respond to social environments. It is possible that these difficulties are compensated in autism through the use of domain-general perceptual reasoning over individually perceived stimuli. If this is the case, adults on the autism spectrum should also show a reliance of abilities for ensemble perception on perceptual reasoning abilities. Finally, it is important to ask whether our findings are specific to ensemble perception of facial attributes or whether they generalise to low-level stimuli (Sweeny et al., 2014). An interesting possibility is that qualitative differences in ensemble perception should manifest in domains where autistic individuals present diminished perceptual adaptation (e.g., numerosity: Turi et al., 2015; audiovisual adaptation: Turi et al., 2016), rather than domains where adaptation is similar to typical development (e.g., perceptual causality: Karaminis et al., 2015).
Acknowledgements We are very grateful to the children, families and school staff who kindly took part in this research. Thanks also to Giulia Cappagli for helping with the development of task stimuli, Anna Rudnicka for coming up with the clone-based cover story, David Aagten-Murphy and Marco Cicchini for assistance with experimental design and data analysis, and Abigail Croydon, Katy Warren, and Hannah White for their help with data collection. This work was generously supported by a grant from the UK’s Medical Research Council awarded to E.P. and D.B. (MR/J013145/1) and also by the European Science Council (ERC advanced grant “STANIB”). M.T.’s research was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FPT/2007-2013) grant agreement #338866, ECSPLAIN. Research at the Centre for Research in Autism and Education (CRAE) is also supported by The Clothworkers’ Foundation and Pears Foundation.
Introduction Dyslexia is characterized by poor reading, writing, and spelling skills despite typical intelligence, no visual acuity problems, and appropriate education (ICD-10-CM, http://www.icd10data.com/ICD10CM/Codes/F01-F99/F80-F89/F81-/F81.0). Boys are 2–3 times more likely to be affected than girls, and cumulative incidence rates vary from 5–12% (Shaywitz et al., 1990). Dyslexia persists in 4–6% of adults (Schulte-Körne and Remschmidt, 2003) disadvantaging employment, and compromising participation in public life. Prevention requires early sensitive screenings and successful remediation, which are both still desirable.