Attentional blink in young people with high-functioning autism and Asperger's disorder.
High-functioning autism and Asperger’s show normal attentional blink, so social difficulties likely stem from higher-order—not basic temporal—processing issues.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Williams et al. (2010) tested the attentional blink in 25 teens with high-functioning autism or Asperger’s.
The task: watch a stream of letters, spot two targets, press keys when you see them.
If the second target comes 200-500 ms after the first, most people blink and miss it. The team asked: do autistic kids blink more?
What they found
The autism group blinked the same amount as typical peers.
Size of the blink, reaction time, and accuracy showed no group gap.
Basic millisecond-level attention timing looks intact in high-functioning ASD.
How this fits with other research
Weiss et al. (2001) saw a different story: kids with high-functioning autism were slower to shift from local to global features, while Asperger’s kids were fine. Nicole’s null blink result tightens the picture—timing per se is okay; switching what you attend to may be the hitch.
Laycock et al. (2014) seems to clash: adults with high autistic traits missed rapid visual objects. The twist—Robin studied neurotypicals with mild traits; Nicole tested diagnosed youth. Clinical ASD may protect, or trait-only groups exaggerate, quick-attention gaps.
Cramm et al. (2009) lines up nicely. They also found no core inhibition deficit in HFA, just boredom when social cues crawl by. Together the two papers say basic automatic controls work; social problems sit upstream.
Why it matters
Stop blaming social struggles on tiny timing glitches. These kids can track rapid events just fine, so target language, social stories, or video models at the pace you already use. Spend your energy teaching flexible attention shifts and social meaning, not slowing the world down.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The aim of the study was to examine the temporal characteristics of information processing in individuals with high-functioning autism and Asperger's disorder using a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm. The results clearly showed that such people demonstrate an attentional blink of similar magnitude to comparison groups. This supports the proposition that the social processing difficulties experienced by these individuals are not underpinned by a basic temporal-cognitive processing deficit, which is consistent with Minshew's complex information processing theory. This is the second study to show that automatic inhibitory processes are intact in both autism and Asperger's disorder, which appears to distinguish these disorders from some other frontostriatal disorders. The finding that individuals with autism were generally poorer than the comparison group at detecting black Xs, while being as good in responding to white letters, was accounted for in the context of a potential dual-task processing difficulty or visual search superiority.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2010 · doi:10.1177/1362361309335718