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The Durham University study suggests visual processing problems could add to their day-to-day difficulties with social interaction.

Tests showed that adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) found it difficult to identify emotions, such as anger or happiness, from short video clips of body movements without seeing faces or hearing sound.

Adults who struggled most with this task also performed poorly when asked to detect the direction in which a group of dots moved coherently on a screen, thought to be due to visual processing problems.

People with autism often have difficulty in attributing mental states to others and this is thought to be one of the main causes of their
struggle to know how other people feel.

This may be because autistic people have a different way of processing basic visual information - such as a person's body language, Dr Anthony Atkinson from Durham University's Psychology Department said.

He said: "The way people move their bodies tells us a lot about their feelings or intentions, and we use this information on a daily basis to communicate with each other.

"We use others' body movements and postures, as well as people's faces and voices, to gauge their feelings.

"People with autism are less able to use these cues to make accurate judgments about how others are feeling. Our research attempts to find out why.

"Our findings point to a difficulty in perceiving or attending to motion as a contributor to the problem of gauging people's emotions.

"We now need to look further to see how exactly this happens and how this may combine with potential difficulties in attention."

Dr Gina Gomez De La Cuesta, Action Research Leader at the National Autistic Society, said: "This is an interesting study which supports the suggestion that people with autism may well process visual information differently to their peers.

"We warmly welcome all research which helps us further our understanding of autism, and how best to help and support those with the condition.

Autism is a complex and lifelong disability, affecting an estimated half a million people in the UK, and the right support at the right time can make a huge difference to people's lives."

The study is published in the academic journal Neuropsychologia today.