We investigated perception of social and physical causality and animacy in simple motion events, for high-functioning children with autism (CA = 13, VMA = 9.6). Children matched 14 different animations to pictures showing physical, social or non-causality. In contrast to previous work, children with autism performed at a high level similar to VMA-matched controls, recognizing physical causality in launch and social causality in reaction events. The launch deficit previously found in younger children with autism, possibly related to attentional/verbal difficulties, is apparently overcome with age. Some events involved squares moving non-rigidly, like animals. Children with autism had difficulties recognizing this, extending the biological motion literature. However, animacy prompts amplified their attributions of social causality. Thus children with autism may overcome their animacy perception deficit strategically.
This study investigated social visual attention in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and with typical development (TD) in the light of Brockmann and Geisel's model of visual attention. The probability distribution of gaze movements and clustering of gaze points, registered with eye-tracking technology, was studied during a free visual exploration of a gaze stimulus. A data-driven analysis of the distribution of eye movements was chosen to overcome any possible methodological problems related to the subjective expectations of the experimenters about the informative contents of the image in addition to a computational model to simulate group differences. Analysis of the eye-tracking data indicated that the scanpaths of children with TD and ASD were characterized by eye movements geometrically equivalent to Lévy flights. Children with ASD showed a higher frequency of long saccadic amplitudes compared with controls. A clustering analysis revealed a greater dispersion of eye movements for these children. Modeling of the results indicated higher values of the model parameter modulating the dispersion of eye movements for children with ASD. Together, the experimental results and the model point to a greater dispersion of gaze points in ASD.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.