Expectations About Autism

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The article “How Magic Changes Our Expectations About Autism” by Gustav Kuhn, Anastasia Kourkoulou and Susan R. Leekam, published in Psychological Science, is about how individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) perceive magic as opposed to the individuals that are considered typically developing (TD). The authors of the article have hypothesize that due to the ASD’s group tendency to ignore social cues and because of their heighted awareness of small details, the ASD group will not be trick as easily as the TD group. The magic trick used in this study is the vanishing-ball illusion, were the magician uses social cues to misdirect the audience’s attention so the audiences will perceive the ball vanish in midair (Gustav, Anastasia, Leeka, 2010). The vanishing-ball is …show more content…

In this study, the researches were trying to find out if individuals with ASD would be less susceptible to the illusion then individuals without ASD. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder typically have superior skills with nonsocial areas and are detail orientated. ASD individuals typically have trouble recognizing and responding to social cues. Because of these traits of ASD individuals, the researchers hypothesis that they would be less susceptible to the illusion, but found the exact opposite. 53% of the ASD group saw the ball leave the hand where as only 15% of the TD group did. When it came to eye tracking, the eye tracker found that the ASD group saw the ball being tossed that last time at much higher rate with 8.52 being the Mean with a stander deviation of 2.32. The TD group had a Mean of 6.91 with a stander deviation of 2.00. Also, the ASD was slower to fixate on the face of the person throwing the ball, with a Mean of 267 milliseconds with a standard deviation of 73.7 were as the TD group at Mean 201 milliseconds and a standard deviation of