Researchers studied a cohort of 400 children aged 9 to 10 in New Zealand who exhibited a full range of possible autism traits and conducted a variety of vision and visuomotor processing tests with them.
Researchers studied a cohort of 400 children aged 9 to 10 in New Zealand who exhibited a full range of possible autism traits and conducted a variety of vision and visuomotor processing tests with them.
Females are often underdiagnosed with being on the autism spectrum because they often mask their symptoms more successfully than males. The key to understanding why may be in a simple eye exam.
New research from the University of Waterloo’s School of Optometry and Vision Science found a difference between how females and males with high autistic traits process visual information. This provides researchers with a possible correlation to explain why some females are underdiagnosed and to help medical teams understand how a person’s neurodivergent presentation is tied to how they process sensory information. This study looked at differences based on sex assigned at birth.
“We found that the level of someone’s autistic traits was meaningfully tied to their performance in various kinds of visual tasks,” said Andrew Silva, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo School of Optometry and Vision Science
Read more at University of Waterloo
Photo Credit: nickelbabe via Pixabay
