Applying Big Data methods on a global sample to understand the cultural variation of autism.
People vary in how much they see the 'trees' versus the 'forest' when viewing a visual scene. We used a classic psychological test in Virtual Reality to see how this effect changes with autistic or ADHD traits. We found that Attention-to-Detail was the most important subscale in both ways of scoring the task. We also proved that it is viable to use classic tasks in Virtual Reality.
We know that some people have issues with their senses, especially autistic people. We developed a questionnaire asking children about their senses based on the adult version of the Glasgow Sensory Questionnaire. We found that sensory issues in children were less related to autism than we expected. We are not sure if this is because the children were answering the questionnaire differently or if they have more issues with their senses than we previously knew.
Video games are commonly enjoyed by autistic people, but we tend to think about this using a medical model. In a questionnaire filled out by 57 people, we found that people with more autistic traits were more motivated to play video games. In particular, people with higher autistic traits were more likely to play games to help with their anxiety.