Alongside difficulties with communication and social interaction, autism is often accompanied by unusual sensory and perceptual experiences including enhanced visual performance on tasks that involve separating local parts from global context. This superiority may be the result of atypical integrative processing, involving feedback and lateral connections between visual neurons. The current study investigated the integrity of these connections in autistic adults by examining two psychophysics tasks that rely on these processes - collinear facilitation and contour integration. The relative contribution of feedback and lateral connectivity was studied by altering the timing of the target relative to the flankers in the collinear facilitation task, in 16 autistic and 16 non-autistic adults. There were no significant differences in facilitation between the autistic and non-autistic groups, indicating that for this task and participant sample, lateral and feedback connectivity appear relatively intact in autistic individuals. Contour integration was examined in a different group of 20 autistic and 18 non-autistic individuals, for open and closed contours to assess the closure effect (improved detection of closed compared to open contours). Autistic individuals showed a reduced closure effect at both short (150 ms) and longer (500 ms) stimulus presentation durations that was driven by better performance of the autistic group for the open contours. These results suggest that reduced closure in a simple contour detection paradigm is unlikely to be due to slower global processing. Reduced closure has implications for understanding sensory overload by contributing to reduced figure-ground segregation of salient visual features.

除了交流和社会互动方面的困难，自闭症通常伴随着不寻常的感官和知觉体验，包括在涉及将局部部分与全局背景分离的任务中增强的视觉表现。这种优势可能是非典型综合处理的结果，涉及视觉神经元之间的反馈和横向连接。目前的研究通过检查依赖于这些过程的两项心理物理学任务——共线促进和轮廓整合，调查了自闭症成人中这些联系的完整性。在 16 名自闭症和 16 名非自闭症成年人中，通过在共线促进任务中改变目标相对于侧翼的时间来研究反馈和横向连接的相对贡献。自闭症和非自闭症群体之间的促进没有显着差异，表明对于这项任务和参与者样本，自闭症个体的横向和反馈连接似乎相对完整。在 20 名自闭症患者和 18 名非自闭症患者的不同组中检查了轮廓整合，以评估开放和闭合轮廓以评估闭合效果（与开放轮廓相比，闭合轮廓的检测得到改善）。自闭症个体在短 (150 毫秒) 和较长 (500 毫秒) 刺激呈现持续时间中表现出减少的闭合效应，这是由自闭症组在开放轮廓方面的更好表现所驱动的。这些结果表明，简单轮廓检测范式中减少的闭合不太可能是由于较慢的全局处理。