Michael C W English

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Verified

Michael verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD
• Honorary Research Associate at The University of Western Australia

Individuals with autism spectrum conditions attend less to the left side of centrally presented face stimuli compared to neurotypical individuals, suggesting a reduction in right hemisphere activation. We examined whether a similar bias exists for non-facial stimuli in a large sample of neurotypical adults rated above- or below-average on the autis...

Previous work shows that doing a continuous performance task (CPT) shifts attentional biases in neurotypical individuals towards global aspects of hierarchical Navon figures by selectively activating right hemisphere regions associated with global processing. The present study examines whether CPT can induce similar modulations of attention in indi...

The Autism‐Spectrum Quotient (AQ) is a psychometric scale that is commonly used to assess autistic‐like traits and behaviors expressed by neurotypical individuals. A potential strength of the AQ is that it provides subscale scores that are specific to certain dimensions associated with autism such as social difficulty and restricted interests. Howe...

A recent meta-analysis found no support for the popular theory that superior visuospatial ability in males is attributable to their relatively greater hemispheric asymmetry of neural functions. However, the issue of whether differences in hemispheric laterality could account for differences in visual perception between the sexes has not been system...

Background Traits and characteristics qualitatively similar to those seen in diagnosed autism spectrum disorder can be found to varying degrees in the general population. To measure these traits and facilitate their use in autism research, several questionnaires have been developed that provide broad measures of autistic traits [e.g. Autism-Spectru...

In separate lines of work, facility in detail-focused local processing and reduced left visual field (LVF) bias have been associated with autism. Plausibly, local-processing facility and reduced LVF bias could reflect a common neurocognitive mechanism – most likely reduced right-hemisphere dominance in visual attention. To test this possibility, un...

Introduction: The Comprehensive Autism Trait Inventory (CATI) comprises six subscales, including “social camouflage” and “sensory sensitivity,” developed to address the limitations of comprehensive evaluation (English et al., 2021). In this study, we report the development of the Japanese version of the CATI (CATI-j) for university students and val...

Research findings indicate that when a task-irrelevant stimulus feature deviates from an otherwise predictable pattern, participants performing a categorization task exhibit slower responses (deviance distraction). This deviance distraction effect reflects the violation of the sensory predictions generated by the cognitive system. In this study, we...

Background: Measures of autistic traits have received extensive use in clinical and research settings. As conceptualisations of autism have grown, and language around autism evolved, many established measures are misaligned with the current diagnostic criteria. The recently developed Comprehensive Autistic Trait Inventory (CATI) was designed to mea...

Difficulties in global face processing have been associated with autism. However, autism is heterogenous, and it is not known which dimensions of autistic traits are implicated in face-processing difficulties. To address this gap in knowledge, we conducted two experiments to examine how identification of Mooney face stimuli (stylized, black-and-whi...

Measures of autistic traits are only useful — for pre-diagnostic screening, exploring individual differences, and gaining personal insight — if they efficiently and accurately assess autism as currently conceptualised whilst maintaining psychometric validity across different demographic groups. We recruited 1,322 autistic and 1,279 non-autistic adu...

Atypical orienting of visuospatial attention in autistic individuals or individuals with a high level of autistic-like traits (ALTs) has been well documented and viewed as a core feature underlying the development of autism. However, there has been limited testing of three alternative theoretical positions advanced to explain atypical orienting – d...

Most individuals show a small bias towards visual stimuli presented in their left visual field (LVF) that reflects right‐hemispheric specialization of visuospatial functions. Moreover, this bias is altered by some neurodevelopmental disorders, suggesting they may be linked to changes in hemispheric asymmetry. To examine whether autism potentially a...

Autistic individuals and individuals with high levels of autistic-like traits often show better visual search performance than their neurotypical peers. The present work investigates whether this advantage stems from increased ability to filter out distractors. Participants with high or low levels of autistic-like traits completed an attentional bl...

Although autistic and anxious traits are positively correlated, high levels of autistic traits are associated with poorer emotional guidance of attention (EGA) whilst high levels of anxious traits are associated with greater EGA. In order to better understand how these two trait dimensions influence EGA, we simultaneously examined the effects of an...

Full article that this poster was based on is now published in Autism Research: https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.2198 BACKGROUND: Similar to clinically-diagnosed autism, autistic traits observed in the neurotypical population are heterogeneous. Psychometric measures of autistic traits, like the 50-item Autism-spectrum Quotient (AQ; Baron-Cohen et al.,...

This poster summarizes research described in a full length article published by Autism Research.

Lay summary: Attentional differences between individuals with and without autism may reflect differences in underlying activation of the left and right hemispheres. In this study, we combine an attentional task that reflects relative hemispheric activation with non-invasive cortical stimulation, and show that attentional differences between health...

Neurotypical individuals display a leftward attentional bias, called pseudoneglect, for physical space (e.g. landmark task) and mental representations of space (e.g. mental number line bisection). However, leftward bias is reduced in autistic individuals viewing faces, and neurotypical individuals with autistic traits viewing ‘greyscale’ stimuli, s...

Individuals diagnosed with autistic spectrum conditions often show deficits in processing emotional faces relative to neurotypical peers. However, little is known about whether similar deficits exist in neurotypical individuals who show high-levels of autistic-like traits. To address this question, we compared performance on an attentional blink ta...

This poster summarizes research described in a full length article published by Autism Research. Individuals diagnosed with autistic spectrum conditions often show deficits in processing emotional faces relative to neurotypical peers. However, little is known about whether similar deficits exist in neurotypical individuals who show high-levels of...

This poster summarizes research described in a full length article published by the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. Individuals with autism spectrum conditions attend less to the left side of centrally presented face stimuli compared to neurotypical individuals, suggesting a reduction in right hemisphere activation. We examined whet...

This poster summarizes research described in a full length article published by Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. Although repetition is generally assumed to enhance the accessibility of memory for rehearsed material, recent research has suggested that prolonged repetition might actually be detrimental under some conditions. In the present work, we...

Although repetition is generally assumed to enhance the accessibility of memory for rehearsed material, recent research has suggested that prolonged repetition might actually be detrimental under some conditions. In the present work, we manipulated repetition duration and learning condition (intentional vs. incidental) in an effort to clarify the r...