Autistic adults display enhanced and locally oriented low-level
perception of static visual information, but diminished perception of some
types of movement. The identification of potential precursors, such as
atypical perceptual processing, among very young children would be an
initial step toward understanding the development of these phenomena. The
purpose of this study was to provide an initial measure and interpretation
of atypical visual exploratory behaviors toward inanimate objects
(AVEBIOs) among young children with autism. A coding system for AVEBIOs
was constructed from a corpus of 40 semistandardized assessments of
autistic children. The most frequent atypical visual behavior among 15
children aged 33–73 months was lateral glance that was
mostly oriented toward moving stimuli and was detected reliably by the
experimenters (intraclass correlation > .90). This behavior was more
common among autistic than typically developing children of similar verbal
mental age and chronological age. As lateral vision is associated with the
filtering of high spatial frequency (detail perception) information and
the facilitation of high temporal frequencies (movement perception), its
high prevalence among very young autistic children may reflect early
attempts to regulate and/or optimize both excessive amounts of local
information and diminished perception of movement. These findings are
initial evidence for the need to consider the neural bases and development
of atypical behaviors and their implications for intervention
strategies.