Armando Bertone

McGill University | McGill · Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology (ECP)

Reading comprehension (RC) is a complex ability relying on multiple cognitive and language processes. This study examined the relationship between multilingual experience, working memory, attention ability, and component skills of reading in children and adolescents with exposure to English and other language(s) at home and school. One hundred and...

Reading comprehension is a complex ability relying on multiple cognitive and language processes. For multilingual children, these processes may be influenced by their daily language experiences. This study examined the relationship between multilingual experience, working memory and attention ability, and component skills of reading in children and...

Learning to read marks an important milestone in children. Extensive research with monolingual and bilingual children has demonstrated that language comprehension (LC) forms fundamental building blocks for reading comprehension (RC). However, mixed findings are reported among studies that compare readings skills in children with and without diverse...

The extant literature aimed at characterizing attentional capability in autistics has presented inconsistent findings. This inconsistency and uncertainty may be the product of different theoretical and methodological approaches used to define attention in autism. In the current study, we investigate whether the allocation of attentional resources t...

Mathematics learning and achievement are integral to academic success and have been shown to predict overall achievement at later grades. Methods for improving mathematics ability are therefore crucial. Domain-general attentional skills are important for the development of mathematical proficiency for typically developing (TD) children and children...

There is a significant overlap in symptomology between individuals with deficits in attention and learning, which is explained by the co-dependent dynamic between the two cognitive constructs. Within this dynamic, attentional resources are allocated to salient stimuli while learning mechanisms distinguish relevant from irrelevant information. Moreo...

Few studies have assessed the visual development of static and dynamic information processing at different levels of processing during typical development from the school-age years to adulthood. The implication of non-visual factors on visual development, such as cognitive (e.g., IQ) and attentional abilities, has yet to be systematically assessed...

Atypical sensory perception has been recognized in autistic individuals since its earliest descriptions and is now considered a key characteristic of autism. Although the integration of sensory information (multisensory integration; MSI) has been demonstrated to be altered in autism, less is known about how this perceptual process differs with age....

Children develop their language capacities and executive functions (EF) throughout their school-aged years. Research has shown that bilingual children show different patterns of EF performance when compared to their monolingual counterparts. However, it is less clear how variations in children’s multilingual experiences associate with variation in...

Background The objectives of this study were to: 1) characterize the sleep behaviors and symptoms of individuals with Christianson Syndrome (CS) by means of validated questionnaires; and 2) determine their associations with daytime emotional and behavioral symptoms in this population. Methods Participants included 16 boys genetically diagnosed wit...

Autism is diagnosed according to atypical social-communication and repetitive behaviors. However, autistic individuals are also distinctive in the high variability of specific abilities such as learning. Having been characterized as experiencing great difficulty with learning, autistics have also been reported to learn spontaneously in exceptional...

Background This feasibility study investigated the viability of implementing a cognitive-based training program (NeuroTracker) and assessing its potential effects on academic performance for adolescents with extremely low IQ. Methods Twenty-six adolescents aged between 11 and 16 years with a Wechsler-based IQs in the extremely low range ( M IQ = 5...

Cognitive flexibility (CF) is the ability to shift between concepts or rules. Difficulty with CF is associated with autism (i.e., ASD) as it contributes to repetitive behaviours. However, little is known about CF skills of autistic adolescents with low intelligence. This study uses the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST) to assess the CF of 36 adole...

Background An important component of academic success in typically developing students is the development of math skills, which is associated with attention and perceptual reasoning (PR) skills. For children with a neurodevelopmental condition (NDC), the relationship is confounded by diagnostic-specific cognitive characteristics. Specifically, enha...

An important component of academic success in typically developing students is the development of math skills, which is associated with attention and perceptual reasoning (PR) skills. For children with a neurodevelopmental condition (NDC), the relationship is confounded by diagnostic-specific cognitive characteristics. Specifically, enhanced PR is...

Atypical sensory processing is now recognised as a key component of an autism diagnosis. The integration of multiple sensory inputs (multisensory integration (MSI)) is thought to be idiosyncratic in autistic individuals and may have cascading effects on the development of higher-level skills such as social communication. Multisensory facilitation...

Our current understanding of how the visual brain develops is based largely on the study of luminance-defined information processing. This approach, however, is somewhat limiting, since everyday scenes are composed of complex images, consisting of information characterized by physical attributes relating to both luminance and texture. Few studies h...

Purpose of review: The objectives of this review are to examine and integrate existing empirical evidence regarding the impact of slow-wave sleep (SWS) modulation on memory and executive function performance in individuals with psychiatric disorders, and to examine the feasibility of integrating SWS modulation into psychiatric care. Recent findin...

Feedback is beneficial for learning. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether: (i) feedback draws attentional resources when integrated, and (ii) the benefits of feedback for learning can be demonstrated using an attention-based task. We therefore: (i) isolated feedback-specific load from task-specific load via individual differences in attention r...

Perseveration significantly predicts mannerisms o Linear regression: F(1,21)=4.604, p=.044. Mannerisms were not significantly different in both IQ groups o Independent t-tests: t(21)=.579, p=.311. No multicollinearity between perseveration and hypo./hyper. o Pearson correlation: r per-hypo. =.118, p=.592; r per-hyper. =.197, p=.368. Moderation anal...

Although impairment in sensory integration is suggested in the autism spectrum (AS), empirical evidences remain equivocal. We assessed the integration of low-level visual and tactile information within and across modalities in AS and typically developing (TD) individuals. TD individuals demonstrated increased redundancy gain for cross-modal relativ...

Individuals with autism are reported to integrate information from visual and auditory channels in an idiosyncratic way. Multisensory integration (MSI) of simple, non-social stimuli (i.e., flashes and beeps) was evaluated in adolescents and adults with (n = 20) and without autism (n = 19) using a reaction time (RT) paradigm using audio, visual, and...

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate superior performances on visuo-spatial tasks emphasizing local information processing; however, findings from studies involving hierarchical stimuli are inconsistent. Wide age ranges and group means complicate their interpretability. Children and adolescents with and without ASD completed...

Atypical sensory perception is now recognized as one of the key characteristics of autism (APA, 2013), with research suggesting that disrupted multi-sensory integration (MSI) may underlie the sensory behaviours seen in this population (Feldman et al., 2018). Further, the integration of social information (such as faces and facial expressions of emo...

Increased participation in structured exercise (SE) routines has positive effects on physiological, cognitive, and social development (SD) for students of all ages and abilities. SE offers unique opportunities for social learning in a non-academic context. SE allows students to practice vital social skills such as observation, imitation, and self-r...

Multiple object-tracking (MOT) paradigms have the potential to highlight attention resource capacities. However, there is a dearth in research exploring the relationship between individual differences in MOT capability and higher-level cognition, such as intelligence. Previous research has demonstrated that manipulating task demands, or the task's...

Atypical face perception in "high-functioning" individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is either interpreted as a consequence of socio-communicative behaviours (Schultz, 2005), or resulting from abnormally local/detailed perceptual strategies (Behrmann et al., 2006). This is exemplified by a decreased ability to discriminate facial identiti...

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is differentiated from other neurodevelopmental disorders by its unique perceptual phenotype (Bertone et al, 2010), defined by a relative facility for processing non-social, spatial information with concurrent difficulty in perceiving complex, socially laden information exemplified by face perception (Simmons et al.,...

Poster Presented at Vision Sciences Society

Previous studies have suggested audiovisual multisensory integration (MSI) may be atypical in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, much of the research having found an alteration in MSI in ASD involved socio-communicative stimuli. The goal of the current study was to investigate MSI abilities in ASD using lower-level stimuli that are not socio-...

Atypical face perception has been associated with the socio-communicative difficulties that characterize autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Growing evidence, however, suggests that a widespread impairment in face perception is not as common as once thought. One important issue arising with the interpretation of this literature is the relationship betw...

Poster Presented at Vision Sciences Society

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often allocate their attention to social information differently than typically developing (TD) individuals. For example, they direct their attention to the periphery, looking more at the background (i.e. the back plane) than the foreground (i.e. the front plane) of a social scene (Klin et al, 2003, K...

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by a detail-driven visual processing strategy, evidence for which has been based largely on cross-sectional studies in small participant groups of limited age ranges. It is therefore unknown when sensitivity to detailed information emerges and develops in ASD. Contrast sensitivity to sinusoidal gratin...

This study investigated the resource limits for dynamic visual attention across development using a three-dimensional multiple object-tracking (3D-MOT) task. Previous studies exploring such attentional limits were restricted by (i) the assessment of MOT in two dimensions, and (ii) categorical speed manipulations. 3D-MOT was used to measure attentio...

Studies investigating visual perception in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have identified atypical abilities mediated by low-, mid-, and high-levels of processing (Mottron 2006, Bertone et al 2010a). Much of this research, however, has focused on isolated levels of processing (i.e. low or high). It is therefore unknown if a functional relationship...

Face perception is the most commonly used visual metric of social perception in autism. However, when found to be atypical, the origin of face perception differences in autism is contentious. One hypothesis proposes that a locally oriented visual analysis, characteristic of individuals with autism, ultimately affects performance on face tasks where...

Visual deprivation leads to massive reorganization in both the structure and function of the occipital cortex, raising crucial challenges for sight-restoration. We tracked the behavioral, structural and neurofunctional changes occurring in an early and severely visually impaired patient before, 1.5 and 7 months after sight restoration using magneti...

Poster Presented at Vision Sciences Society Annual Conference

Individuals with autism recurrently demonstrate faster and more accurate performance (cognitive peaks) on the Block Design Task (BDT) subtest of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale. Cognitive accounts suggest that peak BDT performance derives from a reduced "top-down" interference of perceptual cohesiveness of the global figure, whereas perceptual acco...

Background: Autistic perception is characterized by atypical and sometimes exceptional performance in several low- (e.g., discrimination) and mid-level (e.g., pattern matching) tasks in both visual and auditory domains. A factor that specifically affects perceptive abilities in autistic individuals should manifest as an autism-specific association...

Autistics demonstrate superior performances on several visuo-spatial tasks where local or detailed information processing is advantageous. Altered spatial filtering properties at an early level of visuo-spatial analysis may be a plausible perceptual origin for such detailed perception in Autism Spectrum Disorder. In this study, contrast sensitivity...

Background: The brain’s ability to integrate information coming from single or multiple sensory modalities is critical for perceiving the world as a unified and coherent percept. These processes, referred to as within-modal and cross-modal integration, ultimately allows us to interact with our surrounding and others in an adaptive manner. We rece...

Although much research has investigated the visual development of lower (local) and higher levels (global) of processing in isolation, less is known about the developmental interactions between mechanisms mediating early- and intermediate-level vision. The objective of this study was to evaluate the development of intermediate-level vision by asses...

According to the complexity-specific hypothesis, the efficacy with which individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) process visual information varies according to the extensiveness of the neural network required to process stimuli. Specifically, adults with ASD are less sensitive to texture-defined (or second-order) information, which necessit...

Background. Although atypical performance on visuo-spatial tasks targeting early, non-social perception is a defining characteristic of autism, few biologically plausible hypotheses are available to explain them. Some authors have theorized that persons with autism may have atypical local connectivity resulting in altered response properties of ear...

Visual deprivation leads to the involvement of occipital (visual) regions in the processing of non-visual inputs. These mechanisms of crossmodal plasticity, classically considered compensatory, inevitably raise crucial challenges for sight-restoration. In the current study, we had the unique opportunity to track the behavioral and neurophysiologica...

In this chapter, we discuss methodological factors which impact the estimation of prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and how current trends in prevalence change are being i