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Impoverished capacity for social inference is one of several symptoms that are common to both agenesis of the corpus callosum (AgCC) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This research compared the ability of 14 adults with AgCC, 13 high-functioning adults with ASD and 14 neurotypical controls to accurately attribute social meaning to the interactions of animated triangles. Descriptions of the animations were analyzed in three ways: subjective ratings, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, and topic modeling (Latent Dirichlet Allocation). Although subjective ratings indicated that all groups made similar inferences from the animations, the index of perplexity (atypicality of topic) generated from topic modeling revealed that inferences from individuals with AgCC or ASD displayed significantly less social imagination than those of controls., Author(s): Tiffany Renteria-Vazquez [sup.1] , Warren S. Brown [sup.1] [sup.2] , Christine Kang [sup.1] , Mark Graves [sup.1] , Fulvia Castelli [sup.3] , Lynn K. Paul [sup.1] [sup.2] [sup.4] Author [...]

While many individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience difficulties with language processing, non-linguistic semantic processing may be intact. We examined neural responses to an implicit semantic priming task by comparing N400 responses-an event-related potential related to semantic processing-in response to semantically related or unrelated pairs of words or pictures. Adults with ASD showed larger N400 responses than typically developing adults for pictures, but no group differences occurred for words. However, we also observed complex modulations of N400 amplitude by age and by level of autistic traits. These results offer important implications for how groups are delineated and compared in autism research., Author(s): Emme O'Rourke [sup.1] [sup.2] , Emily L. Coderre [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.59062.38, 0000 0004 1936 7689, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Vermont, , 489 Main [...]

This study examined narrative ability in ASD and parents across two contexts differing in structure and emotional content, and explored gaze patterns that may underlie narrative differences by presenting narrative tasks on an eye tracker. Participants included 37 individuals with ASD and 38 controls, 151 parents of individuals with ASD and 63 parent controls. The ASD and ASD parent groups demonstrated lower narrative quality than controls in the less structured narrative task only. Subtler, context-dependent differences emerged in gaze and showed some associations with narrative quality. Results indicate a narrative ability profile that may reflect genetic liability to ASD, and subtle links between visual attention and complex language skills that may be influenced by ASD genetic risk., Author(s): Michelle Lee [sup.1] , Kritika Nayar [sup.1] , Nell Maltman [sup.1] , Daniel Hamburger [sup.1] , Gary E. Martin [sup.3] , Peter C. Gordon [sup.2] , Molly Losh [sup.1] [...]