To examine the factor structure of temperament in 5-10-year-olds with Williams syndrome, an exploratory factor analysis was conducted on the responses of parents of 192 children on the children's behavior questionnaire. Four factors were identified. Two corresponded to factors reported for typically developing children: effortful control and…

Scores on the autism spectrum quotient (AQ) were examined in 65 adults with ASD. Maternal reports of symptoms were collected simultaneously using the autism diagnostic interview-revised (ADI-R) and the Vineland Screener. A slightly revised AQ administration procedure was used to accommodate adults with below average IQ. AQ scores were lower than…

The psychometric properties of the Pediatric Anxiety Rating Scale (PARS), a clinician-administered measure for assessing severity of anxiety symptoms, were examined in 72 children and adolescents diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The internal consistency of the PARS was 0.59, suggesting that the items were related but not…

The matching law suggests that behavior is emitted in proportion to the level of reinforcement available. The current study investigated this effect in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and focused on the effects of magnitude of reinforcement (Study 1), and rate of reinforcement (Studies 2 and 3), on matching performance. Studies 1…

We utilized a hierarchical figures task to determine the default level of perceptual processing and the flexibility of visual processing in a group of high-functioning young adults with autism (n = 12) and a typically developing young adults, matched by chronological age and IQ (n = 12). In one task, participants attended to one level of the…

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder are vulnerable to anxiety. Repetitive behaviours are a core feature of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and have been associated with anxiety. This study examined repetitive behaviours and anxiety in two groups of children with autism spectrum disorder, those with high anxiety and those with lower levels of…

We evaluated audio cuing to facilitate community employment of individuals with autism and intellectual disability. The job required promoting products in retail stores by wearing an air-inflated WalkAround[R] costume of a popular commercial character. Three adolescents, ages 16-18, were initially trained with video modeling. Audio cuing was then…

The aim of this investigation was to explore the degree to which specific subsets of autistic-like traits relate to performance on the Embedded Figures Test (Witkin et al. in A manual for the embedded figures test. Consulting Psychologists Press, Palo Alto, CA, 1971). In the first group-based investigation with this focus, students were selected…

Between 2006 and 2010, two research-validated instruments, Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ) and Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) were filled out online by 4,188 mothers of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) children, aged 4-21, as part of voluntary parental participation in a large web-based registry. Univariate and multivariate linear…

Children with congenital visual impairment have been reported to be delayed in theory of mind development. So far, research focused on first-order theory of mind, and included mainly blind children, whereas the majority of visually impaired children is not totally blind. The present study set out to explore whether children with a broader range of…

The cross-cultural validity of the Mandarin-adaptation of the social responsiveness scale (SRS) was examined in a sample of N = 307 participants in Taiwan, 140 typically developing and 167 with clinically-diagnosed developmental disorders. This scale is an autism assessment tool that provides a quantitative rather than categorical measure of…

While self-injurious behaviors (SIB) can cause significant morbidity for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), little is known about its associated risk factors. We assessed 7 factors that may influence self-injury in a large cohort of children with ASD: (a) atypical sensory processing; (b) impaired cognitive ability; (c) abnormal…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders have impairments in language acquisition, but the underlying mechanism of these deficits is poorly understood. Implicit learning is potentially relevant to language development, particularly in speech segmentation, which relies on sensitivity to transitional probabilities between speech sounds. This study…

With the passage of the Higher Education Opportunities Act (HEOA) of 2008, students with intellectual disabilities who are enrolled in a federally approved Comprehensive Transition and Postsecondary Program on a college campus will be eligible for some forms of federal student financial aid. This Brief Report discusses the forms of aid available,…

The concurrent validity of the KBIT-2 Nonverbal IQ and Leiter-R Brief IQ was evaluated for two groups of children: those with high functioning autism and those with language impairments without autism. Fifty-three children between the ages of 4 and 13 years of age participated in the study. The correlation between the scales was large (r = 0.62)…