Exploring Tabletop Role-Playing Games as Meaningful Occupations: A Qualitative Exploratory Study.

Tabletop roleplaying games (TRPGs) are an increasingly popular occupation but are still relatively unknown to occupational therapists. This study sought to understand the overall experience, benefits, and consequences of playing TRPGs and the relationship to other occupations. A qualitative research design with a thematic analysis was employed using semi-structured interviews with fifteen participants who had played TRPGs.

Conjunctive Visual Processing Appears Abnormal in Autism.

Face processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is thought to be atypical, but it is unclear whether differences in visual conjunctive processing are specific to faces. To address this, we adapted a previously established eye-tracking paradigm which modulates the need for conjunctive processing by varying the degree of feature ambiguity in faces and objects. Typically-developed (TD) participants showed a canonical pattern of conjunctive processing: High-ambiguity objects were processed more conjunctively than low-ambiguity objects, and faces were processed in an equally conjunctive manner regardless of ambiguity level.

Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Default Local Processing in Individuals with High Autistic Traits Does Not Come at the Expense of Global Attention.

Atypical sensory perception is one of the most ubiquitous symptoms of autism, including a tendency towards a local-processing bias. We investigated whether local-processing biases were associated with global-processing impairments on a global/local attentional-scope paradigm in conjunction with a composite-face task. Behavioural results were related to individuals' levels of autistic traits, specifically the Attention to Detail subscale of the Autism Quotient, and the Sensory Profile Questionnaire.