Interceptive abilities in autism spectrum disorder: Comparing naturalistic and virtual visuomotor tasks.

The statistical analyses included only male participants because there was only one autistic female participant. The sample was small, especially for correlations and Praxis comparisons. The findings did not address whether catching differences persist beyond adolescence. Participants needed a nonverbal IQ of 85 or higher and no physical disability or movement disorder, so findings may not generalize to autistic children with intellectual disability or motor disabilities. Attention differences were not directly measured, and the authors note attention could contribute to group differences. The virtual tasks used a side-view 2D display and did not measure eye movements or head movements, so they are not equivalent to real-world depth demands. The study did not test an intervention, so it cannot support treatment efficacy.

The work was supported by the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative, the Simons Center for the Social Brain at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the National Institutes of Health. The provided text does not report a conflicts-of-interest declaration.

Do not treat the lower catching success as proof that a catching program will help. The study did not test an intervention, and its analyses included only male participants with nonverbal IQ of 85 or higher.