Alteration of attentional blink in high functioning autism: a pilot study.

Amirault et al. (2009) ran a small lab study with high-functioning autistic adults and matched controls. Everyone watched a rapid stream of letters on a screen and pressed a key when they saw two target letters.

The task is called the attentional blink. If the second target comes too soon after the first, most people miss it. The team asked: do autistic adults need more time between targets?

The autistic group showed a longer attentional blink. They needed more milliseconds to spot the second target.

In plain words, their attention took longer to reset, so rapid instructions or visuals may lose them.

The 2023 meta-analysis by M et al. pulls 44 studies and finds the same slow-down across many simple reaction tasks. Marion’s blink result now sits inside this bigger picture.

Ganz et al. (2009) ran almost the same blink task in the same year. They added emotional words and still found autistic adults lagging, giving a clean conceptual replication.

McGonigle et al. (2014) later tested youth with a new rapid visual game and again saw two-thirds of the ASD group slow down. The blink finding extends to kids and to different visual setups.

If you run discrete-trial training, give instructions, or flash visual cues faster than about one per second, some autistic learners may miss every second one. Insert a brief pause—just a half-second—between critical stimuli. You will raise accuracy without extra prompting.