An early origin for detailed perception in Autism Spectrum Disorder: biased sensitivity for high-spatial frequency information

Autistics demonstrate superior performances on several visuo-spatial tasks where local or detailed information processing is advantageous. Altered spatial filtering properties at an early level of visuo-spatial analysis may be a plausible perceptual origin for such detailed perception in Autism Spectrum Disorder. In this study, contrast sensitivity for both luminance and texture-defined vertically-oriented sine-wave gratings were measured across a range of spatial frequencies (0.5, 1, 2, 4 & 8 cpd) for autistics and non-autistic participants. Contrast sensitivity functions and peak frequency ratios were plotted and compared across groups. Results demonstrated that autistic participants were more sensitivity to luminance-defined, high spatial frequency gratings (8 cpd). A group difference in peak distribution was also observed as 35% of autistic participants manifested peak sensitivity for luminance-defined gratings of 4 cpd, compared to only 7% for the comparison group. These findings support that locally-biased perception in Autism Spectrum Disorder originates, at least in part, from differences in response properties of early spatial mechanisms favouring detailed spatial information processing.