The Nottingham Autism Research Team

Research into autism and autistic spectrum disorders
at the School of Psychology, University of Nottingham

Research Projects

There are several research groups within the autism research team, focussing on slightly different questions. Overall, we are all interested in finding out how children and adults with autistic spectrum disorder see, feel and interact with the world. We hope this research will help people understand more about autism and what makes people with autism unique.

Body Perception

Some studies suggest that children with autism have specific difficulties percieving and understanding other people's body movements. This study will use a new task to test how children with autism make sense of hands, bodies and objects. We are recruiting primary-school age children with autism and other learning difficulties for this study. For more information, contact Imogen BoSmith.

Emotion Perception

Recognition of emotions is key to effective social interaction, but some studies suggest people with autism find this hard. However, previous studies have only used very unnatural still pictures of emotional faces. For this project, we have developed a more natural social perception task with videos, and we want to see if adults with and without autism respond in the same way to the videos. We will be using an eyetracker (see picture) to get a more detailed picture of how each person percieves the videos. If you would like to take part, contact Sarah Cassidy.

Goal understanding

In many social interactions, one person has to understand the meaning of other people's movements and gestures. This allows the person to make judgements about what the other person wants and why. We are now investigating if understanding other people's actions is particularly difficult for people with autism, and if so, why this is the case. In this project, we will use functional magnetic resonance imaging to record the brain activity of people with autism while they watch videos of simple actions. This research is being conducted by Antonia Hamilton and Lauren Marsh.

If you would like to take part in this research, please contact Lauren Marsh or download the information poster.

Eye Gaze

Living in a social world, it is important to understand people and make use of the social cues that they generate. We are currently looking to analyse how individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) use the social cue of eye-gaze which is reported to cause so much difficulty for them in real life. We are looking to investigate how attention and memory are affected by eye-gaze cues in photos? We are investigating this behaviourally by carrying out eye-tracking studies, memory studies and change blindness studies. This research is being conducted by Megan Freeth

Moving in the world

Understanding how we process movement is important not only because many things around us are in motion, but also because we ourselves are moving agents. Some previous research has suggested that people with ASD have difficulty perceiving motion, but does this hold for situations where they themselves appear to be moving through the environment?

We are investigating this by administering various tasks involving simulated driving environments to adults with and without ASD. For example, one study involves making judgments about the timing of simulated car collisions. In another experiment, participants must detect hazards in simulated driving environments. The results will shed light on how individuals with ASD process self-motion environments and will also help inform us of aspects of driving skill they may find particularly challenging. This research is being conducted by Lizzy Sheppard

More information

More detailed information about some of this research is available on the CDL site and on the researchers homepages.

Funding

The autism research team receives funding from a variety of sources, including The Leverhulme Trust, Autism Speaks and from the School of Psychology.