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The results leading to this publication have received funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No 777394 for the project AIMS-2-TRIALS. This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and EFPIA and AUTISM SPEAKS, Autistica, SFARI. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript; or in the decision to publish the results. Any views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the funders.

Bullying in schools has been found to be widespread. The popular stereotype of a bully, supported by theories based on the social skills deficit model, is of a powerful but 'oafish' person with little understanding of others. In this article, we trace the origin of this view, and present an alternative view: that some bullies, at least, will need good social cognition and theory of mind skills in order to manipulate and organise others, inflicting suffering in subtle and damaging ways while avoiding detection themselves. Such skills, although likely to be utilised in all bullying, may be particularly useful for ringleader bullies and in the indirect forms of bullying which are more common between girls. Suggestions for further research in this area are made, and implications for anti‐bullying work briefly discussed.

Abstract This study attempts to investigate the role of sensorimotor impairments in the reading disability that characterizes dyslexia. Twenty‐three children with dyslexia were compared to 22 control children, matched for age and non‐verbal intelligence, on tasks assessing literacy as well as phonological, visual, auditory and motor abilities. The dyslexic group as a whole were significantly impaired on phonological, but not sensorimotor, tasks. Analysis of individual data suggests that the most common impairments were on phonological and visual stress tasks and the vast majority of dyslexics had one of these two impairments. Furthermore, phonological skill was able to account for variation in literacy skill, to the exclusion of all sensorimotor factors, while neither auditory nor motor skill predicted any variance in phonological skill. Visual stress seems to account for a small proportion of dyslexics, independently of the commonly reported phonological deficit. However, there is little evidence for a causal role of auditory, motor or other visual impairments.

AbstractRecent findings suggest that children with autism may be impaired in the perception of biological motion from moving point‐light displays. Some children with autism also have abnormally high motion coherence thresholds. In the current study we tested a group of children with autism and a group of typically developing children aged 5 to 12 years of age on several motion perception tasks, in order to establish the specificity of the biological motion deficit in relation to other visual discrimination skills. The first task required the recognition of biological from scrambled motion. Three quasi‐psychophysical tasks then established individual thresholds for the detection of biological motion in dynamic noise, of motion coherence and of form‐from‐motion. Lastly, individual thresholds for a task of static perception – contour integration (Gabor displays) – were also obtained. Compared to controls, children with autism were particularly impaired in processing biological motion in relation to any developmental measure (chronological or mental age). In contrast, there was some developmental overlap in ability to process other types of visual motion between typically developing children and the children with autism, and evidence of developmental change in both groups. Finally, Gabor display thresholds appeared to develop typically in children with autism.