Competing Perceptual Salience in a Visual Word Recognition Task Differentially Affects Children With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Differences in visual attention have long been recognized as a central characteristic of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Regardless of social content, children with ASD show a strong preference for perceptual salience—how interesting (i.e., striking) certain stimuli are, based on their visual properties (e.g., color, geometric patterning). However, we do not know the extent to which attentional allocation preferences for perceptual salience persist when they compete with top‐down, linguistic information. This study examined the impact of competing perceptual salience on visual word recognition in 17 children with ASD (mean age 31 months) and 17 children with typical development (mean age 20 months) matched on receptive language skills. A word recognition task presented two images on a screen, one of which was named (e.g., Find the bowl!). On Neutral trials, both images had high salience (i.e., were colorful and had geometric patterning). On Competing trials, the distracter image had high salience but the target image had low salience, creating competition between bottom‐up (i.e., salience‐driven) and top‐down (i.e., language‐driven) processes. Though both groups of children showed word recognition in an absolute sense, competing perceptual salience significantly decreased attention to the target only in the children with ASD. These findings indicate that perceptual properties of objects can disrupt attention to relevant information in children with ASD, which has implications for supporting their language development. Findings also demonstrate that perceptual salience affects attentional allocation preferences in children with ASD, even in the absence of social stimuli. Lay Summary This study found that visually striking objects distract young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from looking at relevant (but less striking) objects named by an adult. Language‐matched, younger children with typical development were not significantly affected by this visual distraction. Though visual distraction could have cascading negative effects on language development in children with ASD, learning opportunities that build on children's focus of attention are likely to support positive outcomes.

Functional Connectivity Underlying Symptoms in Preschool Boys With Autism: A Resting-State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

“…The enhanced FC between the two suggests that most of the knowledge obtained by preschool boys with ASD from external visual information is limited to atypical visual attention, which is difficult to separate and transfer due to dysfunction of the reward loop. A previous study found that children with ASD prefer to focus on significant visual objects (such as color and geometric patterns) than NC children (spend more time looking at social stimuli), and the more severe the symptoms, the worse the learning ability of children with ASD ( Venker et al, 2021 ). Another study also found that children with ASD who spend more time watching geometric images will show more serious ASD symptoms, a lower intelligence quotient, and lower adaptive skills ( Bacon et al, 2020 ).…”

“…Repetitive and rigid behaviors and social language development disorders are undoubtedly the most obvious clinical symptoms in ASD, and the strengthening of visual ability also seems to be important in the early stage of ASD. For example, an experiment demonstrated that if a toddler spent ≥69% looking at geometric scenes, the positive predictive effectiveness of accurately classifying children with ASD was 100% ( Venker et al, 2021 ). Moreover, the enhanced visual ability of children at high-risk of ASD at 9 months was related to their severity of ASD symptoms at 15 and 24 months ( Varcin and Jeste, 2017 ).…”

Electronic Toys Decrease the Quantity and Lexical Diversity of Spoken Language Produced by Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder and Age-Matched Children With Typical Development

“…In addition, the salient visual features of electronic toys, such as flashing lights, may compete with other relevant aspects of the child's visual environment (Radesky and Christakis, 2016). Visual salience exerts a strong influence on attention allocation in children with ASD (Sacrey et al, 2014;Venker et al, 2018Venker et al, , 2020. Salient auditory and visual features of electronic toys may decrease the likelihood that children with ASD will engage in joint attention and may cause them to miss important linguistic and social cues (Miller et al, 2017;Healey et al, 2019).…”

A Multidimensional Investigation of Sensory Processing in Autism: Parent- and Self-Report Questionnaires, Psychophysical Thresholds, and Event-Related Potentials in the Auditory and Somatosensory Modalities

“…In natural environments, individuals are often exposed to many stimuli simultaneously. Attention capture by aversive stimuli in these busy natural environments might be a path towards subjective hypersensitivity and experiences of sensory distress and overload; indeed, prior research suggests there may be an elevated propensity towards attentional capture in autism (e.g., (63)(64)(65)). Participants (or parent proxy reporters) completing sensory questionnaires would presumably then report on these experiences of attention capture and sensory distress.…”