Change Detection in Naturalistic Pictures Among Children with Autism

Burack, Jacob A.; Joseph, Shari; Russo, Natalie; Shore, David I.; Porporino, Mafalda; Enns, James T.

doi:10.1007/s10803-008-0647-6

Cited by 19 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 45 publications

(63 reference statements)

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“…In the results presented here, no evidence was found of any difference between the capacity of individuals with ASD and IQmatched controls. This is similar to the findings of Fletcher-Watson et al (2006) who demonstrated that the ability to detect changes was equivalent in both ASD and control groups, and may also be consistent with Burack's work (Burack et al, 2009a) that suggests differences will only be seen when developmental level is taken into account. The absence of any increased level of visual short-term memory capacity would suggest that the increased distraction at high perceptual load seen in ASD in experiments one and two is not due to increased capacity.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

“…A study by Fletcher-Watson et al (Fletcher-Watson et al, 2006), however, failed to show a difference between the ability of control individuals and individuals with ASD to detect changes in visual scenes. Likewise, Burack et al (2009a) also reported no difference in performance on a change detection task. However, when task performance was related to the developmental level of the participants a group difference emerged.…”

Section: Predictionsmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Though they then attribute this to a deficit in attentional gating, it may be that increased perceptual capacity is responsible. Furthermore, the conflicting reports regarding unaltered change-detection abilities (Burack et al, 2009b;Fletcher-Watson et al, 2006) may be explained within the perceptual load framework. These two studies used paradigms that involved participants detecting changes within pairs of pictures, whereas Smith and Milne required participants to detect continuity errors in film clips.…”

Section: Implications Of Increased Perceptual Capacitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…how many eggs were used). This places a much higher demand on working memory (the details of the clip must be retained while searching for errors) than the picture comparison tasks used in the other two studies of change detection in ASD (Burack et al, 2009b;Fletcher-Watson et al, 2006). The higher working memory load may make the individuals with ASD more susceptible to distraction from the details within the scene which, on this task, facilitates detection of the continuity errors and results in superior task performance.…”

Section: Implications Of Increased Perceptual Capacitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Selective Attention and Perceptual Load in Autism Spectrum Disorder

et al. 2009

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This thesis examines selective attention in young adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Existing literature regarding this issue is mixed; some research suggesting an overly-focused attentional style (Rincover & Ducharme, 1987) while others highlight an abnormally broad attentional lens (Burack, 1994).The research presented here has, for the first time, examined selective attention in individuals with ASD using a theoretically-led approach based on Lavie's Load Theory of attention and cognitive control (Lavie et al., 2004). Load theory states that the perceptual load (amount of potentially task relevant information) of a task affects selective attention. This theory may explain the equivocal findings in the current data on selective attention and ASD.Using behavioural measures, the pattern of selective attention under various levels of load was explored in individuals with ASD and matched controls. The results provide evidence of increased perceptual capacity in ASD. This means that, at any one time, individuals with ASD may be able to process more information from the visual environment. This increase in capacity was evident on tasks of both unconscious and conscious perception.In light of the social deficits observed in the condition, the work in this thesis also explored selective attention in the presence of social distractor stimuli. Results indicated that faces are less salient for individuals with ASD and, unlike for typical adults, are not processed in an automatic and mandatory fashion. These results bring together findings on selective attention with work on social processing in an attempt to find basic abnormalities which might be fundamental in explaining the disorder. 4For Guy 5

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Section: Predictionsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Implications Of Increased Perceptual Capacitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Implications Of Increased Perceptual Capacitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Selective Attention and Perceptual Load in Autism Spectrum Disorder

et al. 2009

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“…Change within a particular face (such as in its expression or direction of gaze) rather than change from one face to another is arguably a more social and natural type of change and would be an important follow-up experiment to confirm the idea that children with autism lack an attentional bias for faces embedded in naturalistic scenes. Burack et al (2009) studied change detection of objects in children and found no difference in change detection ability in children with and without autism, but claimed a developmental trend toward improved performance in typical persons, but not in persons with autism (the authors did not statistically compare the error rate vs. mental age slopes of the two groups, however). It is important to investigate if a similar discrepancy in task performance between persons with and without autism spectrum disorders as a function of developmental level is found for detecting change over a wide range of social and non-social contexts.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detecting Social and Non-Social Changes in Natural Scenes: Performance of Children with and Without Autism Spectrum Disorders and Typical Adults

Sheth

Liu

Olagbaju

et al. 2010

J Autism Dev Disord

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We probed differences in the ability to detect and interpret social cues in adults and in children and young adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD) by investigating the effect of various social and non-social contexts on the visual exploration of pictures of natural scenes. Children and adolescents relied more on social referencing cues in the scene as compared to adults, and in the presence of such cues, were less able to use other kinds of cues. Typically developing children and adolescents were no better than those with ASD at detecting changes within the various social contexts. Results suggest children and adolescents with ASD use relevant social cues while searching a scene just as typical children do.

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Deficits in adults with autism spectrum disorders when processing multiple objects in dynamic scenes

et al. 2011

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Scientific AbstractPeople with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) process visual information in a manner that is distinct from typically developing individuals. They may be less sensitive to people's goals and, more generally, focus on visual details instead of the entire scene. To examine these differences, people with and without ASD were asked to detect changes in dynamic scenes with multiple elements. Participants viewed a brief video of a person or an inanimate object moving from one object to another; after a delay, they reported whether a second video was the same or different. Possible changes included the figure, the object the figure was moving from, or the object it was moving toward (the 'goal'). We hypothesized that individuals with ASD would be less sensitive to changes in scenes with people, particularly elements that might be the person's goal. Alternately, people with ASD might attend to fewer elements regardless of whether the scene included a person. Our results indicate that, like controls, people with ASD noticed a change in the 'goal' object at the end of a person's movement more often than the object at the start. However, the group with ASD did not undergo the developmental improvement when detecting changes in start and end objects that was evident typically. This led to deficits in adults with ASD that were not specific to scenes with people or to 'goals'. Improvements in visual processing that underlie mature representation of scenes may not occur in ASD, suggesting late developing brain processes are affected. KeywordsASD; change detection; development; developmental disorder; people perception; social cognition As people interact with the environment, they visually process an array of distinct objects. To behave effectively, they must recognize these objects and understand their relationship to each other and the surroundings. The ability to attend to all the important (i.e., meaningful) aspects of a visual scene, and understand their significance, requires complex visual processing that may differ in neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Individuals with ASD have a unique pattern of visual processing. They tend to focus on individual elements, possibly undermining their ability to process global configuration (Jemel et al., 2006;Dakin & Frith, 2005;Behrmann et al., 2006;Brosnan et Scherf et al., 2008). Several theories have attempted to characterize this tendency, including Weak Central Coherence (WCC) (Frith & Happe, 1994;Happe, 1999) and Enhanced Perceptual Functioning (EPF) . Both theories highlight a local bias in visual processing, leading to superior performance on some tasks (i.e, embedded figures task, visual search; Shah & Frith, 1983;O'Riordan & Plaisted, 2001). WCC integrates the local bias with a deficit in processing global configuration in ASD, potentially contributing to deficits on important visual tasks such as face processing (Jemel et al., 2006;Behrmann et al., 2006;Deruelle et al., 2008). WCC predicts that there would be limitations whe...

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Change Detection in Naturalistic Pictures Among Children with Autism

Cited by 19 publications

References 45 publications

Selective Attention and Perceptual Load in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Selective Attention and Perceptual Load in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Detecting Social and Non-Social Changes in Natural Scenes: Performance of Children with and Without Autism Spectrum Disorders and Typical Adults

Deficits in adults with autism spectrum disorders when processing multiple objects in dynamic scenes

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