Sunday, September 04, 2011

The eagle-eyed autists debacle never ends

I'm indebted to Michelle Dawson and her most informative and at times entertaining tweets for the news that there is yet another study and paper in the works debunking the fanciful idea which originated from Baron-Cohen's Autism Research Centre, an institution that is gaining quite a reputation for silly ideas that don't pan out, that autistic people might have visual acuity comparable to birds of prey. This new paper is from Australian and Swedish researchers. Ya gotta laugh...

Visual Acuity in Adults with Asperger’s Syndrome: No Evidence for “Eagle-Eyed” Vision. Biological Psychiatry. Article in Press.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006322311007694

Michelle Dawson
Twitter.
http://twitter.com/#!/autismcrisis

The Curious Case of the Autistics Who Don't Really See Like Eagles: a reference list in chronological order
http://incorrectpleasures.blogspot.com/2011/08/curious-case-of-autistics-who-see-like.html

3 comments:

krex said...

gosh, one more "fail" in an attempt to test for autism in a measurable and scientific way . Glad it's not panning out as I wear glasses and would hate to be thrown back into the NT pile .

I do hope that one day there is an actual consistent and measurable means of Dxing HFA besides "putting dollies in baskets test"and not having (m)any friends .

Lili Marlene said...

Yes, the placement of dollies hardly seems like a scientific test. :-D Having weird friends will count against you too, but try to quantify "weird" in a way that can be replicated by researchers.

Panic Attack said...

Interesting! Michelle Dawson tweets are timely and relevant. I agree with krex - one more 'fail'...