Brief report: Reduced grouping interference in children with ASD: evidence from a Multiple Object Tracking Task.

Evers et al. (2014) watched kids with autism and typical kids play a video game. The game showed several moving targets and some look-alike distractors. Sometimes the targets and distractors were bunched together to form a group.

The kids had to keep their eyes on the targets for a few seconds. The researchers counted how many targets each child could track without losing them.

When the targets and distractors were clumped, the typical kids lost track of more targets. The kids with autism kept tracking almost as well as before.

In plain words, the grouping trick bothered the typical kids more than the autism kids.

Koldewyn et al. (2013) ran a similar MOT study one year earlier and saw the opposite: autism kids tracked fewer targets overall. The two papers look like they clash, but they don’t. Kami used spread-out items, so the task measured how many balls a child could juggle. Kris added grouping, so the task measured how much the clumping hurt. Same tool, different knobs.

Busch et al. (2010) and Leung et al. (2011) already showed that autism kids group by closeness just fine, yet miss color- or shape-based grouping. Kris’s result lines up: when the clumps were made by closeness, the autism kids were not thrown off.

Lian et al. (2023) later showed that stripping busy backgrounds helps kids with autism plus ID focus better. Kris’s finding gives the flip side: when the background forms a tight group, autism kids are less distracted than typical peers.

If you teach a lesson with moving icons on a smartboard, know that grouping them tightly will trip up typical kids first. Kids with autism may keep up longer, so you can keep the pace brisk. When you need to slow things down, spread the items apart instead of clumping them.