The findings are evidence that persons with ASD benefit more than typically developing (TD) persons from spatial framing cues in focusing their attention on a visual target. Participants were administered a forced-choice task to assess visual filtering. A target stimulus was presented on a screen and flanker stimuli were presented simultaneously with or after the target, with varying stimuli onset asynchronies (SOAs). Regardless of SOA, TD children showed the expected distracting effects with slower reaction times (RTs) when flankers were at closer distances from the target. However, children with ASD displayed shorter RTs in the conditions in which the stimuli were presented simultaneously or with a short SOA. These findings are interpreted as reflecting utilitarian attention among children with ASD.

Parental reports of attention problems and clinical symptomatology of ADHD among children with fetal alcohol syndrome disorder (FASD) were assessed in relation to performance on standardized subtests of attentional control/shifting and selective attention from the Test of Everyday Attention for Children (TEA-Ch; Manly etal., 1998). The participants included 14 children with FASD with a mean chronological age (CA) of 11.7 years and a mean mental age (MA) of 9.7 years, and 14 typically developing (TD) children with no reported history of prenatal exposure to alcohol or attention problems with a mean CA of 8.4 years and a mean MA of 9.6 years. The children with FASD were rated by their caregivers as having clinically significant attention difficulties for their developmental age. The reported symptomatology for the majority of the children with FASD were consistent with a diagnosis of ADHD, combined type, and only one child had a score within the average range. These reports are consistent with the finding that the children with FASD demonstrated difficulties with attentional control/shifting, but inconsistent with the finding that they outperformed the TD children on a test assessing selective attention. These findings are considered within the context of the complexity in understanding attentional functioning among children with FASD and discrepancies across sources of information and components of attention.

The manifestations of externalizing and internalizing behaviors among minority adolescents might best be understood by examining their relation to culturally specific factors, such as cultural identity, as well as to factors that seem to be relevant across cultures, such as age and gender. In this study, we examined the roles of age and gender in moderating the relation between self-reported cultural identity and externalizing and internalizing problems and the interaction between Indigenous and Mainstream cultural identity in relation to problematic behaviors. The participants included 61 students (32 female) with a mean age of 14.5 years (SD = 1.69) from a Naskapi reserve in Quebec, Canada. Age moderated the relation between identification with Indigenous culture and internalizing symptomatology. Indigenous and Mainstream cultural identity did not interact in predicting internalizing or externalizing problems. Consistent with the available evidence regarding the centrality of identity in adolescent development, the magnitude of the inverse relation between identification with Indigenous culture and number of clinical internalizing symptoms appears to increase in significance later in adolescence. The lack of an interaction between Indigenous and Mainstream cultural identity in relation to internalizing and externalizing problems suggests that it is the need to consider both cultures individually without the assumption that one negates the other.

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