ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Autism
This article is part of the Research TopicCerebellar function, cognitive effects of sensory noise stimulation, sensory function and motor function in ADHD and autism: differences and similaritiesView all articles
Visual Orientation Discrimination in Adults With ADHD and ASD: The Differential Impact of Clinical Diagnosis and Trait Severity
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom
- 2The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Objectives: This study aimed to clarify whether clinical diagnosis, as opposed to trait severity alone, differentiates sensory processing profiles in adults with ADHD and ASD. Specifically, we compared clinical and non-clinical cohorts matched on standardized self-report measures to test the impact of diagnosis on visual orientation discrimination. Methods: A total of 152 adults were assigned to four matched groups: clinical ADHD, non-clinical ADHD, clinical ASD, and non-clinical ASD (n = 38/group). ADHD and ASD traits were assessed using the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS) and Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire (BAPQ). Sensory performance was measured using a visual orientation discrimination task (with vertical and oblique conditions). Propensity score matching and ANCOVAs (controlling for age/gender) were used to ensure comparability between the clinical and non-clinical groups. Results: Clinically diagnosed ADHD participants displayed significantly poorer oblique orientation sensitivity than non-clinical controls, while clinical ASD participants exhibited superior vertical orientation discrimination compared to their matched non-clinical group. No significant differences were found for vertical thresholds in ADHD and oblique thresholds in ASD. These patterns remained after controlling for age and gender, indicating disorder-specific sensory trajectories, with bidirectional effects of severity and/or clinical diagnosis on sensory performance. Conclusions: Findings suggest that clinical diagnosis captures qualitative as well as quantitative differences not reflected by trait severity alone. Within visual orientation discrimination, ADHD and ASD showed different patterns of diagnostic modulation that are consistent with dimensional and dimensional-categorical (hybrid) interpretative frameworks, respectively.
Keywords: ADHD, ASD, clinical diagnosis, Neurodevelopmental Disorders, sensory processing
Received: 25 Nov 2025; Accepted: 14 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 VARBANOV and Overton. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: VESKO VARBANOV
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.