A few of my favorite things: circumscribed interests in autism are not accompanied by increased attentional salience on a personalized selective attention task

Abstract

BackgroundAutistic individuals commonly show circumscribed or “special” interests: areas of obsessive interest in a specific category. The present study investigated what impact these interests have on attention, an aspect of autistic cognition often reported as altered. In neurotypical individuals, interest and expertise have been shown to result in an automatic attentional priority for related items. Here, we examine whether this change in salience is also seen in autism.MethodsAdolescents and young adults with and without autism performed a personalized selective attention task assessing the level of attentional priority afforded to images related to the participant’s specific interests. In addition, participants performed a similar task with generic images in order to isolate any effects of interest and expertise. Crucially, all autistic and non-autistic individuals recruited for this study held a strong passion or interest. As such, any differences in attention could not be solely attributed to differing prevalence of interests in the two groups. In both tasks, participants were asked to perform a central target-detection task while ignoring irrelevant distractors (related or unrelated to their interests). The level of distractor interference under various task conditions was taken as an indication of attentional priority.ResultsNeurotypical individuals showed the predicted attentional priority for the circumscribed interest images but not generic items, reflecting the impact of their interest and expertise. Contrary to predictions, autistic individuals did not show this priority: processing the interest-related stimuli only when task demands were low. Attention to images unrelated to circumscribed interests was equivalent in the two groups.ConclusionsThese results suggest that despite autistic individuals holding an intense interest in a particular class of stimuli, there may be a reduced impact of this prior experience and expertise on attentional processing. The implications of this absence of automatic priority are discussed in terms of the behaviors associated with the condition.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13229-017-0132-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Visual Search for Circumscribed Interests in Autism Is Similar to That of Neurotypical Individuals

“…Neither children nor adults with ASD demonstrated evidence of visual expertise for their interests relative to age-matched NT controls, even though adults with ASD reported spending more time on their interests than NT adults. The findings are similar to prior work demonstrating no differences in attention (Parsons et al, 2017) or learning (Schuetze et al, 2019) for personalized interests in ASD as compared to NT controls, as well as no differences in visual acuity (Tavassoli et al, 2011). Together the findings suggest that while these search tasks captured low-level visual perceptual differences across key variables (i.e., improved performance with age, increasing RT with array size, predominantly parallel processing for category search), differences in low-level visual perception between ASD and NT participants are relatively minor.…”

Circumscribed interests in adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A look beyond trains, planes, and clocks

“…Despite the prevalence and pervasiveness of CIs in ASD, studies investigating this symptom are limited [ 12 ], particularly in adolescence. Behavioural and neuroimaging studies that have investigated CIs often record responses during viewing of images or videos [ 11 , 37 ].…”

“…While several studies have focused on young children and adults [ 9 – 11 ] relatively little is known about the expression of CIs in adolescents with ASD and how they compare to the interests of typically developing (TD) adolescents in content and intensity [ 12 ]. CIs are suggested to interact with the development of social behaviour and peer relationships [ 7 , 9 ], and are present in most adolescents with ASD (e.g.…”

What interests young autistic children? An exploratory study of object exploration and repetitive behavior

“…A similar study in older children and adolescents found that autistics visually explored fewer objects with longer fixations, but increased object exploration was correlated with increased RRBs [31]. In adolescents and adults performing a selective attention task, there is also preliminary evidence that in some circumstances autistics may experience less distraction or interference from their intense interests than do typical individuals [32]. This result was contrary to predictions and suggests the importance of improved and more direct tests of when or whether RRBs, which encompass atypical autistic interests, limit or interfere with exploration and attendant learning opportunities in autism.…”