We aimed to create a quantitative summary of previous findings and investigate potential factors, which could lead to the variable and often contradictory results on perception of biological motion in autism. We included papers, which compared ASD and typically developing individuals, and focused on biological motion perception (detection, action and emotion perception).Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a developmental condition with recognised impact on social functioning. Dysfunctional processing of sensory information has recently been acknowledged as a key diagnostic criterion (APA, 2013). Hence, understanding how sensory information is processed in autism is a crucial part of understanding and improving the way we treat it. The larger project associated with this dataset aims to test an important new approach for modelling sensory and cognitive processing in autism (Van de Cruys et al., 2014). This approach uses a predictive coding framework to examine how mismatches between expectations and internally generated models of the world can lead to an abundance of error signals in the brains of individuals with ASD. These error signals lead to differences in processing that have the potential for creating anxiety and difficulty in perceiving social signals. To test this framework in ASD we use behavioural and brain imaging experiments that involve observing object and human (biological) motion. This enabled us to investigate the processing of sensory information with and without a social component.

A computerised search involved using the following electronic databases: Dissertations & Theses A&I (ProQuest), Dissertation & Theses: UK & Ireland (ProQuest), Web of Science, PsycINFO (EBSCOhost) and MEDLINE (OVID). The following search terms were used ‘autis’, ‘biological motion’, ‘human motion’, ‘asd’, ‘asperger’, ‘childhood schizophrenia’, ‘kanner’, ‘pervasive development disorder’, ‘PDD-NOS’, ‘PDD’, ‘PLD’, ’point-light display’, “action observation”, “action observation network”, ‘AON’.