Adolescents with autism can gauge the direction of moving objects just as well as healthy controls can, but their confidence in their visual ability is sometimes misplaced, according to unpublished data presented yesterday at the IMFAR 2010 conference in Philadelphia.The results suggest that people with autism have trouble not with perceiving motion, but with using that information to make decisions, the researchers say.Studies of motion perception often use animated dots, some fraction of which are moving in the same direction. Healthy people can pick out this so-called 'coherent motion' when about 10 percent of the dots move in the same direction. Previous work suggested that people with autism need about three times as many dots to see the 'hidden' movement.Richard Krauzlis and colleagues at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, used the same test, but with a twist.Read more at...SFARI, May 2010.