The influence of emotional face distractors on attentional orienting in Chinese children with autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

The current study examined how emotional faces impact on attentional control at both involuntary and voluntary levels in children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A non-face single target was either presented in isolation or synchronously with emotional face distractors namely angry, happy and neutral faces. ASD and typically developing children made more erroneous saccades towards emotional distractors relative to neutral distractors in parafoveal and peripheral conditions. Remote distractor effects were observed on saccade latency in both groups regardless of distractor type, whereby time taken to initiate an eye movement to the target was longest in central distractor conditions, followed by parafoveal and peripheral distractor conditions. The remote distractor effect was greater for angry faces compared to happy faces in the ASD group. Proportions of failed disengagement trials from central distractors, for the first saccade, were higher in the angry distractor condition compared with the other two distractor conditions in ASD, and this effect was absent for the typical group. Eye movement results suggest difficulties in disengaging from fixated angry faces in ASD. Atypical disengagement from angry faces at the voluntary level could have consequences for the development of higher-level socio-communicative skills in ASD.

Attentional Engagement and Disengagement Differences for Circumscribed Interest Objects in Young Chinese Children with Autism

“…Further evidence supporting adopting the MGOP paradigm to investigate attentional disengagement differences is apparent if we look at the SRT for the overlap condition in Experiment 2 (260 ± 127 ms) compared to those in Experiment 3 (397 ± 148 ms). Additionally, the CI effect on ASC was shown to measure failure rates, another crucial measure in visual disengagement studies [ 10 , 14 , 15 , 55 ], which reflects an inability to disengage from the foveal engaged stimuli and hence a failure to look to the peripheral target [ 28 ]. This immersive processing pattern for CI items rarely occurred in the ASC group in Experiment 2.…”