Abstract:  Visual motion perception is the process human brain perceives the dynamic/motion characteristics of objects. Individuals with autism spectrum disorders exhibit deficits in visual processing, such as in optical flow, second-order motion, coherent motion, biological motion, motion speed, and obsessing in repetitive moving objects. While various hypotheses (the Dorsal/Magnocellular pathway-specific hypothesis, Complexity-specific hypothesis, Neural noise hypothesis, Flatter-prior hypothesis, Temporo-spatial processing deficit, Extreme male brain hypothesis, and Social brain hypothesis) have been proposed to explain the abnormal visual processing in autism, none of them has been proven definitively so far. Future study should focus on investigating individual differences and neural mechanism of abnormal visual motion perception, integrating and verifying the hypotheses, as well as exploiting effective evaluation tools and interventions.

Key words: autistic spectrum disorder, visual motion perception, reason analysis, the visual dorsal pathway, neural mechanism