What is a Visual Object? Evidence from the Reduced Interference of Grouping in Multiple Object Tracking for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Objects offer a critical unit with which we can organise our experience of the world. However, whilst their influence on perception and cognition may be fundamental, understanding how objects are constructed from sensory input remains a key challenge for vision research and psychology in general. A potential window into the means by which objects are constructed in the visual system is offered by the influence that they have on the allocation of attention. In Multiple Object Tracking (MOT), for example, attention is automatically allocated to whole objects, even when this interferes with the tracking of the parts of these objects. In this study we demonstrate that this default tendency to track whole objects is reduced in children with Autisim Spectrum Disorders (ASD). This result both validates the use of MOT as a window into how objects are generated in the visual system and highlights how the reduced bias towards more global processing in ASD could influence further stages of cognition by altering the way in which attention selects information for further processing.