An investigation of factors contributing to visual search performance in autism and the broad phenotype

Autistic people and people with high levels of autistic-like traits often outperform controls on visual search tasks. This thesis examines the task properties that contribute to performance. We find that autistic people may be slower to switch responses, and people with high levels of autistic traits may be less affected by noisy visual images, than comparison groups. Visual search performance is affected by both target characteristics and the frequency of target occurrence. The properties of visual stimuli affect the groups differently and therefore need to be carefully controlled in autism research.